Marxism, the Millennium and Beyond Edited by Mark Cowling and Paul Reynolds
Marxism, the Millennium and Beyond
Also by Mark Cowling APPROACHES TO MARX (co-editor with Lawrence Wilde) DATE RAPE AND CONSENT THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO: New Interpretations (editor)
Marxism, the Millennium and Beyond Edited by
Mark Cowling Principal Lecturer in Politics University of Teesside
and
Paul Reynolds Senior Lecturer in Politics and Sociology Edge Hill College
Editorial matter, selection and Chapter 1 © Mark Cowling and Paul Reynolds 2000 Chapter 6 © Bob Jessop 2000 Chapter 11 © Mark Cowling 2000 Chapter 12 © Jonathan Hughes 2000 Chapter 13 © Paul Reynolds 2000 Chapters 2–5, 7–10, 14 and 15 © Palgrave Publishers Ltd 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2000 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). Outside North America ISBN 0–333–80166–0 In North America ISBN 0–312–23597–6 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marxism, the millennium and beyond / edited by Mark Cowling and Paul Reynolds. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–23597–6 (cloth) 1. Communism—History—20th century. 2. Communism—Philosophy. I. Cowling, Mark. II. Reynolds, Paul. HX44.5 .M384 2000 320.53'2—dc21 00–042062 10 09
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Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire
Contents List of Table and Figures
vii
Preface
viii
Acknowledgement
ix
Abbreviation: Marx and Engels, Collected Works Notes on the Contributors 1.
x xi
Introduction: Marxism at the Millennium and Beyond? Mark Cowling and Paul Reynolds
1
Part 1: Towards a Feasible Socialist Politics 2.
What do Socialists Want? Alan Carling
29
3.
The Ethical Marxism of Erich Fromm Lawrence Wilde
55
4.
The Ethical Post-Marxism of Alasdair MacIntyre Kelvin Knight
74
5.
Habermas on Theory and Political Practice Peter M. R. Stirk
97
Part 2: Marxism and the State 6.
Recent Developments in State Theory: Approaches, Issues, Agendas Bob Jessop
7.
Marxism, Liberalism and State Theory Paul Wetherly
8.
Class Struggle and Revolution in Eastern Europe: The Case of Poland Rick Simon v
119 146
161
vi Contents
Part 3: Developing Marxist Politics at the Millennium 9.
Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Future Hillel Ticktin
183
10.
Democratic Marxism: the Legacy of Hal Draper Alan Johnson
199
11.
Femininities: a Way of Linking Socialism and Feminism? Mark Cowling
221
12.
Development of the Productive Forces: An Ecological Analysis Jonathan Hughes
236
Part 4: Marxism and Post-Marxism 13.
14.
15.
Index
Post-Marxism: Radical Political Theory and Practice Beyond Marxism? Paul Reynolds
257
The Post-Marxist Critique of Marxism: The Case of Agnes Heller Simon Tormey
280
‘Not Dead Yet’: Marxism and Political Theory in the Era of Post-Communism Michael Levin
299
311
List of Table and Figures Table 2.1
Four forms of reciprocity
Figure 3.1
Fromm’s notion of social character as intermediate between material basis and ideas (Lawrence Wilde) Ecological impact of the labour process (Jonathan Hughes) Basic types of fettering ( Jonathan Hughes)
Figure 12.1 Figure 12.2
vii
39
58 237 244
Preface This collection has its origins in the 1998 Political Studies Association Marxism Specialist Group Annual Conference, which was held at Edge Hill College in September 1998, on the theme of Marxism, Millennium and Beyond. Thanks to Professor Alistair McCulloch, Head of Research at Edge Hill for his support for the conference, and the conference staff at Edge Hill for the smooth operation of the conference over the two days. Thanks also to the College, who subsidized some delegates attending the conference. Paul Reynolds would like to thank Claire Robinson for her assistance in preparation of parts of the collection and for her intervention on his chapter on post-Marxism. Mark Cowling would like to thank the Research Committee of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Teesside for providing teaching relief, some of which was used in the production of this volume. Both editors would like to thank the staff at Macmillan, particularly our commissioning editor Alison Howson, and our copy editor Linda Auld, for their friendly help. We would also like to thank our contributors, who provided high quality manuscripts in good time. This volume is the fourth edited collection produced by the PSA Marxism Specialist Group. If you might be interested in joining it, contact Mark Cowling at the University of Teesside, email
[email protected]
viii
Acknowledgement The editors wish to thank Cambridge University Press for permission to use Jonathan Hughes’ chapter, ‘Development of the Productive Forces: An Ecological Analysis’, an expanded version of which will appear as Chapter 3 of his Ecology and Historical Materialism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000).
ix
Abbreviation Quotations from K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–) are abbreviated to, for example, C.W., Vol. 5, pp. 50–52.
x
Notes on the Contributors Alan Carling teaches Politics at the University of Bradford. He is the author of several articles on analytical Marxism and of Social Division (London, Verso, 1995), and a founding editor of Imprints. Mark Cowling teaches Politics at the University of Teesside. He convenes the Political Studies Association Marxism Specialist Group and edits its annual journal Studies in Marxism. Previous books are Approaches to Marx (edited with Lawrence Wilde), (Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1989) The Communist Manifesto: New Interpretations (editor) (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998), and Date Rape and Consent (Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998). Jonathan Hughes teaches political philosophy at the University of Manchester. His book Ecology and Historical Materialism is forthcoming in 2000 from Cambridge University Press. Bob Jessop is Professor of Sociology at the University of Lancaster. His books include: Traditional Conservatism and British Political Culture (London, Allen & Unwin, 1974), The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods (Oxford, Robertson, 1982), Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Strategy (London, Macmillan, 1985), State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in its Place (Cambridge, Polity, 1990), editor of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought: Critical Assessments (4 vols), (London, Routledge, 1990). Alan Johnson teaches Politics and Sociology at Edge Hill University College. He is currently working on a book on Hal Draper and has published and researches on socialist politics and popular protest. Kelvin Knight teaches Politics at the University of North London. He is the editor of The MacIntyre Reader (Cambridge, Polity, 1998). Michael Levin teaches politics at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. He is the author of Marx, Engels and Liberal Democracy (London, Macmillan and St Martin’s Press, 1989), The Spectre of Democracy: The Rise of Modern Democracy as Seen by its Critics (London and New York, xi
xii Notes on the Contributors
Macmillan and New York University Press, 1992) and The ‘Condition of England’ Question: Carlyle, Mill, Engels (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998). Paul Reynolds teaches Politics and Sociology at Edge Hill University College. He is currently writing on the political economy of industrial policy and alternative economies, radical politics at the end of the twentieth century, with particular reference to the politics of sexuality, and the application and critique of contemporary social and political theory. Claire Robinson is currently completing a PGCE in Further and Adult education with a view to taking up postgraduate studies in community responses to social deprivation and the politics of film. Rick Simon is lecturer in European Politics at Nottingham Trent University. He is a member of the editorial collective of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe. Peter Stirk teaches Politics at the University of Durham. His is the editor or author of five books on European integration, and of Max Horkheimer: A New Interpretation (Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). Hillel Ticktin directs the Centre for the Study of Socialist Theory and Movements at the University of Glasgow. He edits Critique. Simon Tormey teaches Politics at the University of Nottingham. His chapter is part of a substantial project on Agnes Heller. He is the author of Making Sense of Tyranny: Interpretations of Totalitarianism (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995). Paul Wetherly teaches at the Metropolitan University of Leeds. He has published several articles on Marxism and edited Marx’s Theory of History: The Contemporary Debate (Aldershot, Avebury, 1992). Lawrence Wilde is Professor of Political Theory at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of Marxism and Contradiction (Aldershot, Ashgate, 1989), Modern European Socialism (Aldershot, Dartmouth, 1994), Ethical Marxism and Its Radical Critics (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998), and co-editor with Mark Cowling of Approaches to Marx (Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1989).
1 Introduction: Marxism at the Millennium and Beyond? Mark Cowling and Paul Reynolds
Had this collection been a celebration of the 100 years between the middle of the nineteenth century and middle of the twentieth century, it could have claimed to trace the development of Marxism as a dominant political tradition. This dominance emerged from roots in the late 1840s, with the publication of the Communist Manifesto, and a few years later the formation of the First International, amid widespread political unrest in Europe. It culminated with half the globe under Communist rule and liberal democracy subverted by social reformist and parliamentary socialist politics after the Second World War. Even as late as 30 years ago, a gaze back 100 years would have recognized the global reach of Marxist theory and politics. That period began with workers’ political emancipation in Europe and the growth of socialist politics within organized labour, and ended with the entrenched agenda of social democracy and the rise of Eurocommunism in Europe, and the development of a global détente or accommodation between Communist and Capitalist worlds. Why then, was the end of the twentieth century – and the second Millennium of the Christian calendar – accompanied by a variety of contemporary analyses that commonly consign Marxist politics and theory to the history books?
The death of Marxism? The reasons for this change are fivefold. First, they can be found in the failure of regimes, principally the Soviet Union and China, that claimed their inspiration from Marxism, and particularly Marxist-Leninism. Few Marxists gave communism in the Soviet Union unqualified support after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, followed by the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956. By the 1960s, any defence of the politics of 1
2 Mark Cowling and Paul Reynolds
the Soviet Union had become strictly conditional – for example, in supporting the North Vietnamese against American imperialism. When the ‘Velvet Revolutions’ of 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union the following year signalled the end of ‘actually existing socialism’ or communism as a proclaimed alternative to liberal or authoritarian variants of capitalist societies, few Marxists sought to mount a defence of Communism. China has embraced market capitalism, Cuba has become progressively isolated and other Communist or socialist regimes have degenerated into authoritarian despotism or succumbed to market forces and liberal democratic politics. Today, it is difficult to identify a regime that represents in any sense, however rhetorical, perverse, corrupt and adulterated, the principles expounded by Marx and his successors. For Marxists, communism was a partial, arguably contradictory and deeply flawed application of Marx’s writings, and whatever prospects it had were hijacked by military and elite (party-state) power early in its development. It nevertheless represented evidence of the potential of workers to challenge entrenched class power in capitalist societies, enact political and historical change through revolution and exercise, and so always had a symbolic resonance among Marxists in the West. Without these tangible representations of workers’ politics informed by Marxist analysis, Marxism became susceptible to charges of idealism and unfeasibility.1 Second, the influence of socialist politics and ideas upon social democratic and parliamentary socialist politics has been diminished as political planning and state interventionist solutions seemed to become exhausted in the 1970s. Social democracy’s marriage of market and social values faltered as democratic politics and the growth of decommodified public and welfare sectors pressed at the limits of market tolerance. The optimism of postwar mixed economies wavered with the burden of balancing welfare demands and the maintenance of capitalist markets, and the failure of socialistic statism to define a vision beyond ‘managing capitalism’. The 1990s invention of the ‘Third Way’, of Blair in Britain and Clinton in the US – however analysed – is a more modest path between markets and the state that denies any place for socialist values and politics in its agenda. The ideas and analyses of Marxism seem, therefore, divorced from politics at the Millennium.2 Allied to both of these and third is the rise of a ‘New Right’ politics at the end of the 1970s that combined authoritarian conservative politics with a renewed commitment to free market liberal economics. ‘Reaganism’ in the US and ‘Thatcherism’ in the UK transformed the Anglo-American political landscape and provided the ideological lead
Introduction 3
to reactionary politics across the globe. These ranged from Mitterand’s U-turn from socialism in France to the robust Christian Democracy of Kohl in Germany, to the embrace of the free market by postCommunist states and the emphasis on authoritarian traditions in the Newly Industrializing Counties (NICs) in South-East Asia. Liberal economics lies at the centre of an increasingly global political economy, and liberal values and conservative politics have defined the limitations to the current ‘political agenda’ even among the ‘radical centre’ of the new ‘Third Way’. A feature of this liberal and conservative ‘hegemony’ has been the dismissal of Marxism as dangerous, misconceived and disastrously executed as a political project.3 Fourth, among Marxist thinkers and those more broadly identified on the left, change in contemporary society has challenged existing ideas about the social and political context of capitalist modernity. Politics appeared to shift towards areas less developed within Marxist critiques – consumption, culture, identity, new forms of knowledge and information systems and so on. Postmodern thinkers claimed the world was more diverse, diffuse and infused with difference than any singular theoretical project could hope to conceive. Behind this social critique, post-structuralists dismantled ‘grand narratives’ and the ‘Enlightenment Project’ with its ‘age of reason’, critiquing the very essence of Marx’s ideas – the materialist conception of history and dialectical methodology. Both spawned a post-Marxism that alternately rejected or transformed Marxist politics, theory and concepts. This coincided with the development of new social movements that espoused post-material values, cut across class lines in recruitment and organizing issues and analysis, and organized around environment, militarism and identity in such a way as to gain the high ground for radical debate. Whereas Marxism was at the centre of critiques of capitalist modernity, those who argue that contemporary society is becoming postmodern claim that Marxist thought is fundamentally flawed, obsolete and irrelevant.4 Finally, Marxism itself lost its sense of coherence as a political creed, easily deduced from the Communist Manifesto and Capital. The emergence of Marx’s earlier writings have demonstrated contradiction and divergences in Marx’s work, and suggested to some that there were ‘Two Marxes’.5 While much of the development of Marxist theory and politics in the twentieth century has involved a growing sensitivity and sophistication to Marxist analyses, the price has been a growing gap between theory and practice and an advancing eclecticism within Marxist theory. While Marxist diagnosis remained much respected,
4 Mark Cowling and Paul Reynolds
Marxist prognosis became progressively discounted. The gap between theoretician and activist became a source of tension. The absorption of other intellectual constructs and ideas made it more difficult to define the ‘essence’ of a ‘Marxist’ analysis. Marxist scholarship and activism seemed preoccupied with claiming the ‘true’ mantle of Marx rather than actively seeking the solutions he called for to social and economic ills. Factional battles, authoritarian applications of ‘readings’ of Marx or incubations of parts of the Marxist ‘oeuvre’ with very different ‘bedfellows’ became central activities for the left, and often with damaging outcomes. These developments are not intrinsically negative, and indeed seemed to ‘prove’ the validity of dialectical concepts of change – many theorists interested in Marxism built on some aspects of the Marxist legacy while criticizing others. It became increasingly difficult, however, to identify what Marxism is and what it offers social and political thought.6 These five factors give rise to a question which unites the essays in this text: what is the relevance of Marxism to our attempts to make sense of the world – and change it – at the start of a new Millennium? If, as Sim suggests, Marxism is exhausted, offering little more than nostalgia to contemporary theoreticians and political actors, such a text would seem obsolete.7 The authors in this collection, however, firmly believe that Marxist theory and politics still has a contribution to make to twenty-first century societies. In preface to a discussion of their different and sometimes quite divergent arguments, it is worth briefly sketching the general theoretical and political contexts from which Marxists argue its continuing importance. Again, five factors present themselves.
‘Not dead yet’: what Marxism still has to offer First, Marxism represents the first and principal radical critique of the ‘Enlightenment Project’. The developments that separate premodern from modern society – industrialization and liberal capitalism; secularism and the power of science and reason; constitutional, representative and democratic politics; the rule of law, the emergence of the nationstate; and the emergence of civil society – find their most coherent and comprehensive critique within the Marxist tradition. Indeed, the development of the ‘Enlightenment Project’ might be best characterized through the struggle between narratives of legitimization and their radical critique. The grand narratives of liberalism and liberal democratic variations have attempted to codify and universalize themselves
Introduction 5
as the founding principles of the political development of modernity, and particularly to legitimate concepts of liberty, freedom and democracy against the lived experience of the market, state and civil society. Marxism has provided a critique of this legitimization, seeing it as part of a strategy by which the ruling classes, wedded to capitalist production, appropriates reason, productive forces, profit and political power. For Marxists, this version of the ‘Enlightenment Project’ ushers forth the final and most advanced stage of class exploitation and expression – capitalism – and sows the seeds for its revolutionary transformation into socialism. This battle for the ‘Enlightenment Project’ stands at the root of theoretical and philosophical questions about understanding the lessons of the last two centuries and shaping the future of human society in the next Millennium. However far postmodernism, feminism, anti-racism and identity politics, ecology politics and radical democratic political settlements have modified or contested the political terms of debate, the ‘Enlightenment Project’ forms the context and has drawn the contours of the current choices and social trajectories being theorized. Second, and following on from above, while Marxism and socialist politics are currently unfashionable, their contribution to theoretical and political debates at the end of the twentieth century is still substantial. The structural and hegemonic critiques of the politics of disability, sexuality, gender and race and radical democracy owe much of their epistemological suppositions and methodological discourses to the example of Marxism. In the theorization of the workings of capitalist economies, democratic politics, civil society and contemporary culture, many leading thinkers use in their analysis theories and concepts derived from Marxist thought, whether they renounce or acknowledge their intellectual debts. Third, and reinforcing that, Marxism offers an alternate perspective in the study of society. To be precise, to speak of Marxist sociology or economics is a misnomer – for Marxists such disciplinary separations are part of the means by which social critique is subverted by being made abstract and removed from its materialist and historical roots. Marxism is conceived as an alternative to the ‘social sciences’ and to lose it as an alternative, or to have it subsumed, simplified and subverted into sociology or economic books for the ‘text-book generation’ leads to misrepresentation and misconception. Marxism offers a living, dynamic and changeable science of society that has within it a range of debates, different and discrete positions and competing analyses of society. Not to read Marxist critiques, and more not to read critiques
6 Mark Cowling and Paul Reynolds
written by Marxist thinkers, would limit the extent to which students of society were confronted with a range of critical positions and analyses from which society can be viewed. Marxists recognize this opening and closing of social critique as part of the hegemonic construction of class power in capitalist societies. The recent tendency towards the representation of Marxism as ‘dead’ in its principal analyses or core concepts – outlined above – is political. The reduction of Marxism to communism, or to the words of Marx alone, or to stereotypical misrepresentations (such as the idea of only two classes in society, rather than aligning different social groups within class positions structured by the location of power with property, production and profit) is political. Both narrow the scope of debate and so narrow analysis of the range of options offered by different political ideas. Features and concepts within Marxist thought and politics may be subject to substantial criticism, but much is still of value and offers a significant critical contribution to debates about the prospects, scope and nature of political change in the new Millennium. Fourth, and following on again, is the poverty of the heterogeneous forms of politics of resistance against inequality, prejudice and the exercise of elite (or class) power since the end of the 1970s. As much as new social movements, radical democratic politics, developments in identity and issue politics and the democratization of political institutions have dominated recent debate, there is little comparison between the gains won under these banners for the excluded and dispossessed, and those won through socialist politics before then. The relative failure of the post 1970s politics of resistance can be seen in the present preoccupation of ‘politics’ with the gains and losses of the middle classes and its failure to attend to the needs of poorer people other than through the bland concept of social exclusion. This is not to suggest that past gains were unequivocally positive – many critics agree postwar state-directed welfare and economic planning, for example, did not reach those most excluded or dispossessed. However, to the extent that these gains represented variations of power exercised by the ‘masses’ (or working classes), they had value. While the contemporary politics of issue and identity offers participation and empowerment, it does so through a fragmentary political lens and an atomized reflection of individual consciousness apart from collective association. When theory shifts from the particularities of issues or identities to broader concerns and critiques, it requires at least some understanding, if not a working model, of structural, collectivist and social forces and how they define the scope and limits to political change. Marxism has played a central part in
Introduction 7
providing these features of critique even for those who have moved on to concerns Marx did not address. Finally, however much the 1990s have become characterized by the rise of new social movements and the development of radical democratic and ‘New Times’ politics, many of the key contemporary political actors, institutions and orthodoxies remain subject to Marxist critiques. However weakened, trade unions and workplace associations are still central to democratic representation in contemporary politics. Labour and socialist parties, whatever their current political and theoretical attachments, are still principal actors in the development of policy and occupation of the executive in political systems. For many, the little power available to the dispossessed and excluded is still exercised principally through workplace protest or through solidarity with such organizations. It is not necessary to deny change when critically evaluating the nature of politics at the Millennium, to say that the political ideas, organization and agitation drawn from Marxism remain relevant, even if change encourages reappraisal and critical reflection. Following change is a necessary feature of political analysis, but critically evaluating change and analysing continuity is as important. Drawing from some or all of these insights, the contributors to this book share the view that Marxism continues to offer a range of worthwhile concepts with which to understand the world, and most of them remain interested in changing the world in a socialist direction. They disagree, however, on a range of issues, notably which elements of the Marxist legacy are most valuable and how these elements can be related to social change. Both shared values and disagreements offer the reader a worthwhile insight into the different possibilities Marxism offers as an approach to politics, a theoretical tradition and a means of analysing and effecting political change as we enter the new Millennium. It also means that the collection itself is eclectic in approach and character.
The structure and content of the book The book is divided into four sections. The first four chapters have a common theme in exploring how a feasible socialist politics – that combines theory and practice effectively – can be developed at the Millennium. It is an interesting comment on the state of Marxist scholarship that virtually nothing is said in this section about Hegel, who has historically been seen as the most important philosophical influence on Marx. This is not surprising in Alan Carling’s chapter, as he is an advocate of analytical or rational choice Marxism, which repudiates
8 Mark Cowling and Paul Reynolds
Marxism’s Hegelian heritage and looks instead to the verbal and conceptual precision of analytical philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition. Carling’s concern is to pose the question, ‘What do socialists want?’ His starting point is the failure of communism and the extensive Marxist criticisms of the mixed economy politics. The lesson he draws is that socialists need to look again to their basic values, using these as criteria by which to judge the performance of socialist politicians and politics and conceive a socialism for the twenty-first century. Carling identifies four central socialist values – self-realization, community, democracy and equality – and subjects them to critical evaluation. His analysis leads him to substitute self-realization with autonomy because self-realization can take forms that contradict socialism, such as lowering the general quality of life or harming specific individuals. He asserts the importance of altruism within community in counterbalance to the egoism of the market, but rejects idealized altruism or small-sized communities as failing to make a feasible contribution to the current debate. He makes a cautionary analysis of democracy as a procedural goal with no common agreement on political forms of democracy and no necessary correlation between democracy and socialist politics. In discussing equality, he points out that there is a tension between pure equality and efficiency, and a problem of whether equality is a feature of starting point, process or outcome. In this discussion, aimed at the practical problems of conceiving and developing socialist politics, Carling shows what contribution rational choice Marxism makes to socialist debate and asks some telling questions about how socialist politics might be thought out at the Millennium. In contrast to Carling, Larry Wilde is committed to a version of Marxism which emphasizes the ideas of the young Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in particular the idea that there is a human ‘essence’ which becomes alienated under capitalism. If, as Carling doubts, we can identify a human essence, then self-realization becomes an important socialist value. Wilde argues that Erich Fromm’s combination of Freudian insights with Marxism, without Freud’s biological determinism or psychoanalytic mysticism, is an important contribution to socialist debate about self-realization. Wilde reviews Fromm’s analysis that character is socially constructed under capitalism and that it is alienated even if people are affluent: they suffer an ‘inner vacuity’ in their lives, centred on consumption. He shows how Fromm sought to counter this by building an ethics in the Aristotelian tradition, based on an essential human nature that strives towards specific goals for
Introduction 9
humanity or telos beyond the simple satiation of appetites or selfish possessiveness. This ethic formed the basis of a humanistic politics, through which he supported many causes of contemporary importance: radical democracy, ecology, feminism, the Third World, and disarmament. Wilde sketches Fromm’s answer to alienation in his advocacy of a Guaranteed Income for all, rendering work voluntary, and of workers’ participation in management. He locates Fromm at the centre of socialist concerns and shows that his ideas are linked to the political issues and concerns of contemporary theory. In doing so, he demonstrates the fruitfulness of Marxist engagements with competing and even hostile, psychological theories, and the contemporary relevance of Marxist thinking. The links that Wilde makes between Marx and Aristotle, within a more philosophical frame of reference, are pursued in greater depth by Kelvin Knight in his chapter on Alasdair MacIntyre. Knight’s intention is to explore how MacIntyre makes a contribution to socialist politics at the Millennium. He characterizes MacIntyre as a post-Marxist, but one very different from the thinkers attacked by Paul Reynolds in his chapter (see below). He summarizes MacIntyre’s Aristotelian ethics in After Virtue and his metatheory of rival philosophical and political traditions and explores MacIntyre’s approach to Marxism as a tradition with teleological limitations – limited because it seeks to determine history in a particular and prescribed pattern. This survey forms the basis for a discussion of the Aristotelian potential in Marx’s and in contemporary humanistic Marxists’ accounts of praxis (the unity of theory and action), alienation and critiques of capitalist rationality. Both Wilde and Knight are therefore making and exploring links with thinkers who are apart from the ‘mainstream’ of Marxist theory, but retain what they see as core Marxist concepts and concerns, whereas Carling’s movement from the ‘mainstream’ has led to an abandonment of some elements of those core concerns. The themes of praxis, alienation and rationality are continued in Peter Stirk’s discussion of a key thinker from another strand of Marxist thought – the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Jurgen Habermas, despite severe objections to the original Frankfurt School arguments, still considers himself an advocate of critical theory. Stirk focuses on the central issue of Habermas’s understanding of the relationship between theory and practice as a basis for socialist politics. Habermas contrasts two conceptions of scientific theory: the modern (post-Hobbesian) conception, which it has no ethical content and seeks to accurately analyse social development as a basis for political action; and the ancients, such
10
Mark Cowling and Paul Reynolds
as Aristotle, who saw political practice as coming from prudential judgement linked to communal deliberation about the good life, guided by philosophical exactitude and discipline. Marx clearly belongs to the former conception of science. Habermas aspires to a version of the latter, but one that is viable in the modern world and includes the notion of political practice as liberation. Through a focus on the study of knowledge, rationality and communication, Habermas seeks to explore how socialist politics can emerge in this way from capitalist rationality. Stirk explains, however, how Habermas’s reconstruction of the Marxist materialist conception of history – the central context for Marxist theories of political change as class struggle – to this end has created a critical problem. Habermas has separated the pattern of historical development – the characteristic ways in which history unfolds – from the process of historical development – how history unfolds as a dynamic process – thus weakening his theory’s tie to the practical politics of liberation. Stirk concentrates on Theory of Communicative Action, where Habermas distinguishes the social realm – the lifeworld – where knowledge and discourse is accessible to all – from more specialized spheres with specialized discourse and ethical criteria which are not readily accessible to all. Free discussion in the lifeworld is restricted, however, by worries that too general a questioning of norms might ‘short circuit’ social action and encourage inertia. This encourages a basic acceptance of the instrumental value of dominant ideas such as markets and power. While this might appear to keep debate manageable, it also legitimates the values of those in power. Stirk uncovers the problematical nature of this narrowing of debate and Habermas’s problems in reconciling the opening of debate with the weaknesses in his own discussion of theory and practice – that unending debate about the pattern of change might impede its dynamic pursuit. Stirk nevertheless traces how Habermas seeks to resolve this difficulty in exploring the possibilities of institutionalized human rights, popular sovereignty and the conditions for free public debate. Stirk concludes that something of the ancient conception of political practice Habermas aspires to survives despite the problems that Habermas manufactures within his thinking. Stirk’s discussion both explores the contribution of a key Marxist thinker to contemporary social and political thought, and again pursues themes of how ideas, theory and practice are joined in a coherent socialist politics. In the second section, three authors discuss aspects of a central area of Marxist political analysis – the state. In a magisterial chapter, Bob Jessop reviews the role of Marxist theory in recent developments of state
Introduction 11
theory. His account starts with the revival of Marxist state theory in the late 1960s and 1970s, initially directed to showing that the Keynesian welfare state remained a capitalist state. Their competing starting points, introspective theoretical debate and disregard for the variations in regimes and forms of capitalist state limited the contribution of these debates to socialist politics. They did, however, establish two important general lessons. While capitalist states may functionally perform tasks to facilitate capitalist economies, they operate with a degree of political autonomy and may actually become dysfunctional for capitalism. Second, state power is not simply and instrumentally derivative of the power of the ruling class, but requires more complex analyses of social relations. This has involved understanding state power as determined by the condensation of the balance of class forces within the state at a particular historical moment, and a focus on the role of the state as regulator of specific capitalist accumulation regimes, including postFordist regimes. Marxist state theory nevertheless focuses on the wider determination of state power in capitalist societies and so widens debate from institutional to societal frames of reference. Jessop then reviews several non-Marxist approaches to state theorizing that have introduced important themes for any contemporary attempt to analyse the state. These include neo-statist approaches aimed at ‘bringing the state back in’ against a background of theorizing which is allegedly too ‘society-centred’, too concerned to explain the state in terms of the wider interests of society. These theorists place great stress on institutional state autonomy. In contrast, approaches stemming from the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault tend to dissolve the state, but retain an interest in ‘governmentality’ – the process and action of governing. Discourse analysts understand the state as a judicial concept and see state policies as discursively constituted from a range of interest mediations within this judicial-political structure. Feminists have taken a variety of approaches to the state, challenging the distinction between the state as public and so divorced from private civil society. They argue that there is a patriarchal relationship between the state and men’s violent domination of women, most of which occurs in ‘private’. Following this review of alternative theories, Jessop identifies five themes common to many of them: the variability of the idea of statehood; the relative strength and weakness of states as political forms; the impact of globalization; issues of the scale of state power; the identification of mechanisms of governance. What Jessop’s discussion shows is not only the relationship of Marxist analysis to wider scholarship, but the contribution of insights informed by Marxist theory to the
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range of contemporary alternatives currently under consideration in state theory. In a more specific discussion, Paul Wetherly attempts to identify and compare the central characteristics of Marxist and liberal analyses of the state. The nature of the state is a central question in political thought, and Marxism and liberalism arguably constitute the two most central traditions. The discussion highlights several areas of continuity between the two ostensibly rival traditions, as well as areas of fundamental difference. Commitment to what Held refers to as a ‘principle of autonomy’ gives to both a distinctly anti-statist temper and a view of the state as a ‘necessary evil’. Liberalism and Marxism have tended to share a perspective which sees the capitalism as the source of societal dynamics and progress, but, at the same time, identifies certain political conditions of existence of this order. In classical liberalism this is given expression in the ideal of the minimum state, and in Marxism in the view of the state as essentially the repressive arm of the bourgeoisie. The enormous growth of the state in our century appears equally at odds with both of these traditions. In explaining this growth an important contrast between the two traditions is Marxism’s predominantly ‘societycentred’ account as against the emphasis on ‘state-centred’ arguments in liberalism. The society-centred emphasis of Marxist theory derives from a more elaborate conception of the ‘needs of capital’ together with a class theory of the state. For Marxism, as against the liberal depiction of the market as an individualistic voluntary exchange system, capitalism is characterized as a system of power relations which decisively shapes the disposition of political power. Marxism is, above all, ‘sceptical’ about economic power, and liberalism about political power. But, it is argued, Marxism needs to take the state seriously as a potentially autonomous subject with its own interests and capacities for action. In this way the ‘society-centred’ emphasis can avoid ‘economic determinism’ and yield a plausible account of the relative autonomy of the state. The discussion necessarily uses broad-brush strokes to characterize these two traditions, but provides a useful starting point for further elaboration of the comparison between two central theories of the state and the insights of liberalism, which might be relevant to the development of Marxism. The final chapter of this section specifically addresses the question of state and revolution, and paradoxically revolution against a Communist state, that of pre-1989 Poland. Rick Simon identifies this event as a revolution within a Marxist analysis, involving a change in the relations of production and a change of ruling class. He engages in debate
Introduction 13
with Marxists with differing analyses, such as Cohen, who emphasize the contradiction between the forces and the relations of production as crucial to explaining the onset of revolution.8 Simon identifies a struggle over the control and distribution of the social surplus as the central motivating force. He therefore sees such struggles as less foregone conclusions than Cohen might emphasize – less an evolving and programmed tension between capitalist development and class antagonisms and more a political struggle for power and control. Simon follows a particular approach to the economies of Eastern Europe under communism – the ‘deformed workers’ state’ approach. This approach views Communist states as having a planned economy with no private capital, but a surplus controlled by the Communist Party, which fostered a privileged social stratum, the ‘nomenklatura’. These regimes were legitimated by their role as guardian of the interests of the working class. Simon charts the industrialization of Poland in the postwar Communist bloc and its demise as an uncompetitive part of a globalizing capitalist world economy and a weak and inefficient Soviet economic bloc, and as a state unable to plan the economy to sustain growth and surplus while retaining popular support. This economic failure catalysed the rise of Solidarity and the struggle both in opposition and then in government to dismantle the planned economy and replace it with an alternative, more liberal form of state economic regulation. Simon’s chapter offers much scope for constructive argument about the role of the state in the context of recent political change, as well as demonstrating how specific debates around the nature of revolution and the state reflect broader critical discussions between competing strands of Marxist critique. In the third section, four chapters look in various possibilities for Marxist politics at the Millennium. Many Marxists distanced themselves from the support of violent revolution following the collapse of the Soviet Union; others went further and turned to liberalism, social democracy and postmodernism. Hillel Ticktin, however, sees the collapse as a vindication of the main ideas and methods of Trotsky, which he summarizes in his chapter. He sees Trotsky’s main contribution to Marxism as his dialectical method of analysis, which is tied up with his other major contributions: the theory of permanent revolution; his critique of the Soviet Union; his view of Russia as semi-Asiatic; his concept of the long wave of capitalist development and crisis; and his conception of revolution. Ticktin takes the view that in Trotsky’s early writings are the central strands of a viable revolutionary strategy for socialism, and the continuing crisis of capitalism and failure of communism
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provides excellent prospects for Marxist politics as delineated by Trotsky. Ticktin argues that Trotsky’s later work did not add to the revolutionary value of his early work, and on the contrary has encouraged misreadings and misunderstandings of Trotsky’s theory and politics. He identifies these later works as the root of the splintering of Trotskyist groups into rival factions with dogmatic or unsustainable theories and political analyses. The task for Marxists is to retreat from these untenable positions and return to Trotsky’s early work. Ticktin’s work demonstrates the committed application of Trotsky’s analysis, and illustrates the terms of debate within Marxist theory and politics where different authors advocate particular theoretical propositions and political projects within the broader Marxist tradition. Alan Johnson considers the Marxism of Hal Draper whose writings constitute one of the major theoretical contributions of the Workers’ Party – Independent Socialist League (1940–58). In the unpropitious conditions of cold-war America this tendency was significant less for its size or political weight than for its role as a Marxist think-tank. It was, according to Stanley Aronowitz, ‘the most intellectually vital of all the radical formations in the 1940s and 1950s’, in the United States. Johnson’s chapter focuses on the birth of this tendency in a fundamental critique of Trotsky’s theory of Stalinism. Johnson argues that the central foundations of democratic Marxism stem from the idea that there is a ‘decisive qualitative difference between proletarian and bourgeois rule’. Particularly crucial is the rejection of Trotsky’s view that the Soviet Union remained a workers’ state because property was nationalized, even if it was controlled by a bureaucracy – where economic change supersedes political form. If this is accepted, criticism of Stalinism and the despotic power of Communist parties becomes blunted – the means of production are, at least nominally, the property of the people. In contrast, democratic Marxists argue that if the state – or alternate political form – is not controlled by the working class, nationalized production is not owned and controlled by the working class. Along with this goes a critique of Trotsky’s idea that the Stalinist regime was Bonapartist – forwarding working class interests without democracy. Because politics controls economics in the conception of a democratic socialist state, the idea of some other grouping carrying out the will or interests of the workers is incoherent. For the proletariat to rule it requires an active and plural polity, one in which people have political freedom to organize parties opposed to the government. This critique of Trotsky led to a ‘deep-going emphasis on the integration of
Introduction 15
socialism and democracy in all aspects of politics’, as Draper put it. Johnson argues that by stressing the indivisibility of socialism, democracy and liberty, and by integrating all three on the social ground of self-emancipation and popular struggle, Draper and his co-thinkers were able to re-read the history of the socialist tradition as a war between two souls, authoritarian and democratic. They were able to recover the democratic nature of Marx’s thought as founded on self-emancipation not economic necessitarianism, and to creatively develop a revolutionary democratic Marxism in the era of Stalinism. Draper identifies footholds for the Gulag that developed within the Marxist tradition, such as the fateful substitution of a dictatorial conception of the polity of a workers’ state for Marx’s democratic original, the absurdity of ‘proletarian Bonapartism’, and the failure of the tradition to take full measure of Marx’s excoriating critique of state and bureaucracy. Johnson suggests these writings possess striking contemporary relevance after the ignominious collapse of Stalinism, and, in their location of the democratic and self-emancipatory texture of socialism in and not ‘post’ Marx, constitute an alternative approach to the integration of socialism and democracy to that offered by ‘post-Marxism’. The other two chapters in this section move away from discussions within Marxism and toward engagements with other theoretical traditions. Mark Cowling considers possible links between Marxism and feminism after the decline of Marxist feminism. This decline is in part a product of the general failure of Communist states, and more specifically their relative failure to alleviate hostile gender roles and identities. In part, it is a product of tying gender emancipation to class and capitalism, when feminism sought to address the cultural and social diversity of women within a gendered critique. Cowling does not seek to revive Marxist feminism, but rather to suggest tentative but productive points of contact between Marxists and feminists at the Millennium. Cowling argues that advanced capitalist patriarchal societies are becoming increasingly diverse in their representations of masculinity and femininity. This diversification affords women greater opportunity to acquire equal or better education, earnings and occupational positions than men do, while rejecting avenues of male domination such as domestic and sexual violence. Cowling argues that socialists should recognize the emergence of divergent femininities as different avenues to the empowerment of women, and debate as to which femininities fit best with which socialist projects. Cowling’s essay is useful in its demonstration of how a thinker using Marxist insights can contribute to
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theoretical and political debates – in this case feminist debates – without defending or imposing a Marxist ‘position’ on such debates. The relationship between Marxism and Green politics has also been a fraught one. In his chapter Jonathan Hughes discusses a central point in the Green critique of Marxism, namely that it is committed to the development of the productive forces, to unlimited growth, and that this is inevitably damaging to the environment. Hughes accepts that the development of productive forces is always associated with the development of technology but questions whether this necessarily leads to ecological problems. Hughes argues that contemporary technological developments typically involve the substitution of computers for mental labour, which in turn typically leads to more efficient use of energy and raw materials. He then considers the Marxist argument that capitalism fetters the means of production, which would become more productive under socialism. He argues that revolutionary change from one mode of production to another might, contrary to green critiques, involve efficiency and ecology through the expression of workers’ felt needs. There is nothing to stop these including a healthy environment and leisure. Socialist revolution could be motivated by a desire for an ecologically sound pattern of technological development, or result in such a state of affairs. Hughes’ strength here is to show how Marxism has some considerable contribution to make to ecological politics as a principal form of radical critique into the twenty-first century. The final section of the book considers the relationship between Marxism and post-Marxism. It starts with Paul Reynolds’ chapter on theory and politics of post-Marxism. He focuses on Laclau and Mouffe, who attempt to continue Marx’s project of human emancipation but reject (a crude version of) his work with insights from poststructuralism, postmodernism and feminism, but takes on some of the broader concerns of post-structuralist critics such Derrida and Lyotard. Reynolds sees the development of post-Marxism as embedded in the context of the crisis of radical politics and then social democracy in the late 1960s and 1970s, in tandem with the failure of communism. Radical thinking – he asserts – shifted from the idea of changing society as a whole to a more modest vision of cultural and identity politics, conditioned by postmodern analyses of social change, diversity and fragmentation . Reynolds then reviews particular post-Marxist contributions, starting with Laclau and Mouffe’s ‘radical materialism’, focused on identities as
Introduction 17
central organizing forms in society and points of social antagonism, and oppression and emancipation as the subject of plural discourses with no determining or essential root. They replace class politics with radical democracy, informed by and constructed through a diversity of egalitarian interests. Reynolds sees post-Marxism as a way for intellectuals disillusioned both with Marxism and with liberal capitalism to retain the feeling of radicalism while reorientating themselves towards consumerism. Post-Marxism, he says, forms a self-referential language game for the academic and cultural literati, occupying the media, academy and politics, and leaving behind the working classes as a political force. Radical democracy, their grand solution, involves a sleight of hand in which they smuggle a teleology of empowerment and equality into what is supposed to be a non-teleological project. It is assumed that the various radical projects are compatible, whereas they may be partially antagonistic, and might at minimum require prioritization. It also assumes that the constantly renewed rules of radical democracy can be arrived at without significant conflict or division, a point on which Reynolds is sceptical. Although some of the pluralistic concerns of postMarxism are worth integrating into a Marxist framework, he sees it as fundamentally a retreat from the general idea of human emancipation. Simon Tormey accepts Reynolds’ criticisms of the vagueness of Laclau and Mouffe’s radical democracy, and puts forward Agnes Heller as a post-Marxist thinker with a much clearer idea of radical democracy. Heller is not avowedly post-Marxist, and the Marxism she quit was humanist Marxism. Her vision is of a self-created world where ‘class’ is a self-description, not a ‘fate’. She explicitly values autonomous individuals, not social groupings or divisions. She accepts that relative scarcity is inevitable, and therefore a theory of distributive justice is essential. In her initial reflections on justice she argues that the bulk of society’s resources should go to developing the capacities of each person. By 1990, however, this develops into merely a demand that we all respect the expression of individual needs, so that any idea of radical redistribution has been abandoned. Heller’s radical democracy starts life as a demand for universal participation, but then moves on to a defence of existing forms of democracy, which are designed, among other things, to protect private property. She fails to seriously consider the likely consequences of an attempt by, say, an elected US government to radically redistribute property: Tormey considers such a government might well enjoy the same fate as Allende in Chile. Tormey concludes that Heller exhibits what
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Laclau and Mouffe would produce if they fully developed their ideas on radical democracy: a defence of the institutions of the status quo, and an emphasis on individual responsibility. Tormey’s close analysis and criticism of an influential contemporary thinker supports the critical refutation of post-Marxist alternatives as a radical project with emancipatory possibilities. The third contribution on post-Marxism looks more narrowly at the role of Marx and Marxism in university courses such as History of Political Thought or Sociological Theory. Mike Levin argues that discussion of Marx’s ideas was seriously distorted by their presumed role in underpinning and justifying Communist societies. Now that communism has collapsed and is not widely seen as an attractive alternative politics, he says, it is possible to discuss Marx’s ideas in the same way as those of Hegel or Rousseau. Taking this approach he considers that four areas will emerge as Marx’s main contribution: the centrality of class and the economic; his sense of history as a long-term enterprise, in which present-day capitalism may not be the best humanity can do; a vision of a set of ideals, even if his exact version of communism is unrealizable; and his method of analysing capitalist systems may offer insights even if their precise working is now somewhat different from what he described. Levin’s discussion gives a flavour of how Marxists are engaging in critical reflections of their own positions at the Millennium.
Marxism in the twenty-first century? This text does not provide readers with a picture of a unified movement marching in tight formation into the next Millennium. Recent restatements of the worth of Marxist theory and politics have taken different directions and constitute different attempts to redefine the value and place of Marxist scholarship in contemporary social theory and politics. In considering future trajectories for Marxism, it is worth briefly reviewing these trends. In the United States, the marriage of Marxism and analytical philosophy in the work of John Elster, John Roemer and others has become a thriving and dominant school of thought.9 Roemer’s agenda for Marxist scholarship is unequivocal: [The essays collected here] . . . view Marx as an important intellectual ancestor, but they also acknowledge that he died over a century ago. It is no longer clear what characterizes Marxian scholarly work, nor
Introduction 19
that it should be characterizable. A particular viewpoint in social theory becomes enduring only if it is able to borrow willingly and easily from other viewpoints, and insofar as they are similarly disposed to borrow from it.10 Wright, Levine and Sober make a persuasive case for analytical Marxism: As a strategy for reconstructing Marxism, analytical Marxism above all aspires to clarify rigorously foundational concepts and assumptions and the logic of theoretical arguments built on those foundations . . . like analytical philosophers generally, analytical Marxists place these values at the very centre of their intellectual project, sometimes to the virtual exclusion of other objectives characteristic of earlier Marxisms. In particular, analytical Marxists are impatient with vague programmatic schemes of an all-encompassing sort and with views that elude precise formulation. As analytical Marxism has emerged as a distinct current, sweeping philosophical pronouncements have given way to more modest but tractable theorizing. Positions have been carefully elaborated, revised and, in some cases, abandoned . . . We believe, nevertheless, that the Marxist theoretical project is advanced by this process of clarification, deflation and reconstruction.11 Carling’s essay in this collection exemplifies the virtues Wright et al. would claim for analytical Marxism. Undoubtedly, it constitutes a critical project that applies exacting analytical method to propositions and assumptions too often shrouded from critical evaluation within both the larger corpus of Marxist scholarship and the prevailing politics of contemporary capitalism. Where analytical Marxism is perhaps more subject to question is in its relationship of theory to political practice, and the extent to which it constitutes a ‘politics’ that recognizes conflict and antagonism as a central feature of the social organization of late capitalism. In Europe, Marxist critiques have been less focused around a single development in theory. The dominant homage is undoubtedly that to Gramsci. Gramscian Marxism has transformed into the post-Marxist hegemonic politics of Laclau and Mouffe, the ‘New Times’ politics of Stuart Hall and the British and European left, and the broader ‘cultural turn’ in sociological and political analysis.12 The diversity of analysis that issues from these sources is bewildering in its theoretical lineages and political approaches.13 Rooted in the new possibilities offered by
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postmodern thinking, these approaches are typified by their focus on culture, their discursive frameworks of analysis and their shift towards subjectivities and identities as the focus of analysis and democracy as an organizing concept for ‘left’ politics.14 They also build a bridge between radical dissent and political orthodoxy in their influence on the agenda of ‘Third Way’ politics under Blair in Britain, Clinton in the US and, to a lesser extent, Schroeder in Germany.15 Diverse approaches to contemporary politics and new intersections between radical minds and governing parties might be welcome in exploring the politicization of those disadvantaged and alienated after the New Right hegemony of the 1980s and early 1990s. It remains to be seen, however, how far such politics might be subsumed within the ‘new social democracy’ or represent the dissolution of political resistance amongst an everproliferating number of diverse issues and causes. More, though many of these diverse approaches might claim a lineage from Marxism, the theoretical and political linkages are increasingly tenuous. When Laclau and Mouffe claim a positive context to a Gramscian post-Marxism – ‘to form the thinking of a new left . . . in that infinite intertextuality of emancipatory discourses in which the plurality of the social takes place’ – the danger is that this ‘new left’ loses any core values and theoretical approach other than a similar language of emancipation.16 Reynolds’ essay in this collection devotes itself to a trenchant critique of this ‘New Left’. At the same time, French post-structuralism has influenced reappraisals of the legacy of Marxism as well as critical rejections. Derrida’s Spectres of Marx has been influential in developing a rapproachement between postmodern and Marxist thinkers, after the deep antipathy rooted locally within the trajectory of French philosophy and communist politics (briefly discussed in Reynolds’ essay in this collection).17 More recently, Terrell Carver has recently offered what he describes as a ‘mild form of post-modernism’ in problematizing traditional readings of Marx and exploring Marx’s writings through hermeneutic, deconstructive and contextualist reading strategies.18 This new reading of Marx is complemented by recent re-readings of Marx through the guise of other philosophers, and away from traditional readings. Knight, in this collection, for example, gives us an Aristotelian Marx. These reading strategies undoubtedly build a richer diversity of insights into what is a fragmented and voluminous literature. The connection these readings make with politics are more tenuous, however. They could easily lead towards politics as academic and cultural discourse not particularly different from Laclau and Mouffe.
Introduction 21
A further trajectory for Marxist theory and politics in Europe has been the power of Critical Theory and particularly the work of Jurgen Habermas in pursuing a radical project in the spirit of Marx. Habermas’ universal pragmatics and theory of communicative action represent significant developments in the radical critique of the ‘Enlightenment Project’, although Stirk, in this collection, has pointed to some limitations.19 Critical theory has been claimed as both an inspiration to poststructuralists such as Foucault, and a source for positive interventions against postmodern theory and politics, and as such remains important in debates on theorizing contemporary society.20 There are, of course, more traditional defences of Marxist theory and politics, such as McCarney’s thoughtful revision and restatement of the value of Hegelian Marxism.21 There are also those who continue to champion the grand traditions of Leninism and Trotskyism within Marxism, and still organize as vanguard parties of the far left. This position is succinctly characterized by Molyneux: The authentic Marxist tradition is not difficult to identify. It runs from Marx and Engels, through the revolutionary left wing of the Second International (especially in Russia and Germany), reaches its height with the Russian Revolution and the early years of the Comintern, and is continued, in the most difficult circumstances possible, by the Left Opposition and the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s . . . It is a tradition which has always sought to unite theory and practice . . . Its most important contributions include theories of the party (Lenin), the mass strike (Luxemburg), permanent revolution (Trotsky) imperialism and the world economy (Luxemburg, Bukharin, Lenin and Trotsky) the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism (Trotsky), fascism (Trotsky and the restoration of the activist, dialectical element in Marxist philosophy (Lenin, Gramsci and Lukács).22 While the prevailing intellectual fashion is to regard this as a rigid, closed and dated articulation of Marxist theory and politics, its connection with workers’ grassroots activism and the richness, however critically besieged, of its tradition begs that it is not dismissed too easily. Ticktin, in this collection, provides a trenchant defence of the continuing relevance of Trotsky’s thinking, and Simon makes effective use of a similar approach in analysing the ‘Velvet Revolutions’ against communist rule in 1989. Levin, in a quite different context, through the
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mechanism of university teaching, urges caution in the way some of the founding texts and thinkers in the Marxist tradition are so easily discarded. Mandel’s conclusion to his survey of the present state of revolutionary Marxism and the socialism of the Fourth International is worth reflection here: Our ‘model’ of socialism . . . [has] no illusions about ‘a society without conflict’ or an ‘end of history’ . . . All we want to do is to solve those half dozen or so problems resulting from the incongruity between the technical and scientific capabilities of the human species on the one hand and the system of production for private profit in the other.23 Different readers will come to their own conclusions as to the future trajectories of Marxist theory and politics. Amid the diversity of contributions it is clear that there remains much in the Marxist framework that is of continuing interest and value in making sense of the world. Indeed, the breadth and diversity of the different contributions to this text illustrate, we hope, the contribution Marxism can make to theoretical and political debates into the twenty-first century. It seems appropriate, however, to lay down some thoughts on four preconditions for a revitalized Marxist theory and politics in the twenty-first century. First, the delicate balance between continuity and change, development and reconstruction in Marxist theory must contain within it a genealogy that identifies core constituents and their rearticulation in Marxist analysis. While avoiding the sometimes futile factionalism of past debates where different ‘Marxisms’ sought ownership of the ‘mantle’ of Marxism, there must be meaning to responses to the question: what is it Marxists argue? In such a rich theoretical tradition, there is room for debate, but there should also be demarcation, and distinctions between Marxism and post-Marxism or Marxism and ‘New TimesCultural politics’ are important. In order to have a coherence, within which there are dialectical tensions and disagreements, there should be a clear conceptual constituency that informs Marxist theory. Second, developments in Marxist theory must be tied, or at least potentially capable of being tied, to political agency. Jessop and Wetherly’s essays on the state in this collection, for example, demonstrate the continuing and strong contribution Marxist theory and theoreticians schooled in Marxist concepts and ideas can make.24 Whether
Introduction 23
such insights have been adequately articulated in ways that inform practice in the last 30 years, is more questionable. Not to recognize the symbiotic interdependence of theory and practice is to fall into what Callinicos cautions as the disillusionment and introversion of post-1968 intellectuals who embraced postmodernism.25 Third, while it is important to engage with change, it is equally important for Marxists not to forget or fail to reevaluate their past for insights into revitalized theory and politics in the future. Tormey’s discussion of Heller’s post-Marxism, Jessop’s development of strategic-relational approaches to state theory and deployment of strategic selectivity as a conceptual variable, Cowling’s post Marxist-Feminist engagement with feminist agendas and Hughes’ discussion of Marxism and ecology are all representative of a thriving engagement with change. Equally, however, Johnson’s retrieval of Hal Draper’s socialism as ‘Democratic Marxism’ and Wilde’s development of ethical Marxism through Erich Fromm are challenging and engaging examples of how the past can inform and reinvigorate present theory and politics.27 Finally, the essence of Marxism is a critical engagement with both theory and politics. This collection represents a contribution to the continuing critical engagement with the ideas of Karl Marx some 117 years after his death. The diversity of positions within the collection hopefully represent the diverse range of scholarship, thought and critique within the broad church of ‘Marxism’. Equally, the collection has, hopefully, as a common theme to all its constituents, a sense of critical engagement, where the arguments developed will draw in the reader, provoke thought and encourage further enquiry. If it achieves that aim, it will have been worthwhile.
Notes 1. For an overview and some polemical discussion of these transformations, see A. Callinicos, The Revenge of History: Marxism and the East European Revolutions (Cambridge, Polity, 1991); M. Waller, The End of the Communist Power Monopoly (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1993); R. Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe (London, Chatto & Windus, 1990); J. Feffer, Shock Waves: Eastern Europe After the Revolutions (Boston, South End Press, 1992); S. Yabuki, China’s New Political Economy: The Giant Awakes (trans. S. Harner) (Oxford, Westview Press, 1995). 2. See L. Pantich and C. Leys, The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour (London, Verso, 1997); F. Fox Piven (ed.), Labor Parties in PostIndustrial Societies (Cambridge, Polity, 1991); B. Hindess, Parliamentary Democracy and Socialist Politics (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983):
24
3.
4.
5.
6.
7. 8. 9.
10. 11. 12.
Mark Cowling and Paul Reynolds L. Panitch, Working Class Politics in Crisis (London, Verso, 1986); H. Machin (ed.), National Communism in Western Europe: A Third Way for Socialism? (London, Methuen, 1983); P. Filo Della Torre, E. Mortimer and J. Story, EuroCommunism: Myth or Reality (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979). See A. Adonis and T. Hames (eds), A Conservative Revolution?: The ThatcherReagan Decade in Perspective (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1994); J. Krieger, Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Decline (Cambridge, Polity, 1986); S. Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London, Verso, 1988); B. Jessop, K. Bonnett, S. Bromley and T. Ling, Thatcherism (Cambridge, Polity, 1988); A. Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (London, Macmillan 1988); S. Gunn, Revolution of the Right (London, Pluto Press/Transnational Institute, 1989). S. Sim (ed.), Post-Marxism: A Reader (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998), D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989); Z. Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London, Routledge, 1992); S. Crook, J. Pakulski and M. Waters, Postmodernisation: Change in Advanced Society (London, Sage, 1992); S. Hall and M. Jacques (eds), New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1989); S. Best and D. Kellner Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (London, Macmillan, 1991); L. Cahoone (ed.), From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1996); F. Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London, Verso, 1991). For a representative discussion see M. Cowling ‘The Case for Two Marxes Restated’, in M. Cowling and L. Wilde (eds), Approaches to Marx (Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1989) pp. 14–32. Wilde’s chapter in the present collection, together with other writings he refers to there, offers an interpretation of Marx as an Aristotelian which, if accepted, suggests a way of understanding Marx’s work as closer to a unified whole. See, selectively, T. Bottomore (ed.), Modern Interpretations of Marx (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1981); A. Callinicos (ed.), Marxist Theory (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989); J. McCarney, Social Theory and the Crisis of Marxism (London, Verso, 1990); S. Resnick and R. Wolff (eds), Rethinking Marxism: Essays for Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy (New York, Autonomedia, 1985); Cowling and Wilde (note 5); E. Mandel, Revolutionary Marxism Today (London, New Left Books, 1979). Sim (note 4), pp. 1–11. See G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978). See, selectively, J. Roemer (ed.), Analytical Marxism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986); A. Carling, Social Divisions (London, Verso, 1991); E. O. Wright, A. Levine and E. Sober, Reconstructing Marxism (London, Verso, 1992); J. Roemer, A Future for Socialism (London, Verso, 1994); and for a more reflective and eclectic discussion, A. Callinicos, Marxist Theory (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989). J. Roemer, ‘Introduction’, in J. Roemer (note 9) pp. 6–7. E. O. Wright, A. Levine and E. Sober (note 9) pp. 3–4. Selectively, E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London, Verso, 1985) (see Reynolds’ essay for a discussion of this politics); S. Hall
Introduction 25
13.
14.
15.
16. 17. 18.
19.
20. 21. 22. 23. 24.
25. 26. 27.
and M. Jacques (note 4); F. Jameson, The Cultural Turn (London, Verso, 1998). See, for example, T. Jordan and A. Lent, Storming the Millennium: The New Politics of Change (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1999) and G. Mulgan, Life After Politics: New Thinking for the Twenty-First Century (London, Fontana, 1997). This trend has influence on both sides of the Atlantic. For US sources see D. Trend (ed.), Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship and the State (London, Routledge, 1996). S. Aronowitz, ‘The Situation of the Left in the United States’, Socialist Review (Special Edition on Radical Democracy) 23/3, 1994, pp. 5–80. For example, see A. Coddington and M. Perryman (eds), The Moderniser’s Dilemma: Radical politics in the Age of Blair (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1998), and D. Miliband (ed.), Reinventing the Left (Cambridge, Polity, 1994). The intersection of ‘rainbow left’ and New Labour is interesting. Both David Miliband (son of Ralph Miliband) and Geoff Mulgan, founder member of Demos ‘think-tank’, are advisers to and work closely with Blair. E. Laclau and C. Mouffe (note 12), p. 5. J. Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London, Routledge, 1994). T. Carver, The Postmodern Marx (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998). Carver qualifies his project thus: ‘I use the world “mild” in order to order to distance myself from any grand confrontations with modernity, the Enlightenment, postmodernity or hyperreality, and to warn readers that I am merely handling language in a way that the hermeutically or ‘interpretatively’ inclined will find commonplace’, ibid., pp. 2–3. See, selectively, J. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalisation of Society (Cambridge, Polity, 1984); The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Polity, 1987); Theory of Communicative Action Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A critique of Functional Reason (Cambridge, Polity, 1987); On the Pragmatics of Communication (Cambridge, Polity, 1998). This case is represented well in D. Kellner, Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity (Cambridge, Polity, 1989). J. McCarney, Social Theory and the Crisis of Marxism (London, Verso, 1990). J. Molyneux, What is the Real Marxist Tradition? (London, Bookmarks, 1985) pp. 65–6. E. Mandel, Revolutionary Marxism Today (London, New Left Books, 1979) p. 236. The continuing strength of Marxist scholarship in analysing contemporary socialist politics is demonstrated in A. Gamble, D. Marsh and T. Tant (eds), Marxism and Social Science (London, Macmillan, 1999). A. Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge, Polity, 1989), esp. pp. 162–71. E. Mandel, ‘The Current Situation and the Future of Socialism’, Socialism of the Future 1/1, 1992, pp. 50–62. Also see L. Wilde Ethical Socialism and its Radical Critics (London, Macmillan, 1998) and A. Johnson, ‘ “Neither Washington Nor Moscow”: The Third Camp as History and a Living Legacy’, New Politics VII/3, Summer 1999; Alan
26
Mark Cowling and Paul Reynolds Johnson, ‘Democratic Marxism’, Historical Materialism, 5, Winter 1999. A range of different contemporary work might be referred to as extending Marxist scholarship whilst restating its radical potential. See, for example, R. Gottlieb, Marxism 1844–1990: Origins, Betrayal, Rebirth (London, Routledge, 1992) and E. M. Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Part 1 Towards a Feasible Socialist Politics
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2 What do Socialists Want? Alan Carling1
By this question I mean, ‘what criteria need a society fulfil in order to satisfy socialists?’ The question evidently concerns the values that ought to frame socialists’ political aspirations. This question has presumably always been important for socialists as much as for any other political grouping. But the importance of the question tended to be overlooked when there was agreement on the left about the means by which the values were to be realized, by central planning, for example, or the mixed economy and the universalistic welfare state. The connection between the institutional means and the implicit socialist value was too often taken for granted; allegiance to the means tended to obscure the commitment to the ends, and discussion of the means to the means occupied the forefront of political debate. We are now in a situation on the left in which conviction in any of the received models has largely broken down. In such a situation, it becomes peculiarly important for socialists to try to identify (i) what the values are (ii) what institutional means are required to deliver them. In this, I am agreeing with the spirit of Jerry Cohen’s ‘Back to Socialist Basics’, and in this chapter I will concentrate on the philosophical issue (i) with occasional forays into the sociological issue (ii).2 This inspiration is not different in principle from the self-proclaimed mission of New Labour. What Tony Blair claims to be doing is hanging on to old labour values, and rejuvenating the means for delivering them.3 So I do not think it is correct to criticize New Labour just on the grounds that it is prepared to think the unthinkable. Scepticism about 29
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the New Labour project should nevertheless revolve around (a) the nature of the values that are actively espoused, either in rhetoric or in government (b) the willingness to take on the vested interests historically opposed to the cause of labour (as opposed to taking on the vested interests historically supportive of the cause) and (c) the extent to which New Labour is boxed in by the commitments deemed necessary to defeat the Tories in 1997, and otherwise appear as a responsible governing party. But to reach these judgements, one must first know what would constitute an acceptable socialist performance, either in rhetoric, or (especially) in government. And that returns us to the question of values, because until you know what you would be satisfied with, it is difficult to know how dissatisfied you are.4
What are the core socialist values? The difficulty here is that socialism seems to involve a family of values, rather than a single value. Like real families, the members of this family may squabble among themselves, they may share members with other families – certainly the anarchist family, the liberal family and the conservative family, but hopefully not the reactionary family – and it is not obvious that any one member of the family is so pre-eminent as to be representative of the whole. Indeed, one might define the core values as that set of values which are (a) indispensable to the socialist project and (b) mutually irreducible. The distinctiveness of socialism from anarchism, liberalism, conservatism, and so forth will then reside first in the conjunction of its core values (not all of which are arguably shared by any other political creed) and second in the relative emphases accorded to the different members of the set (emphases which also serve to demarcate different brands of socialist thought within a broader tradition). The core values of socialism have historically included self-realization, community, democracy and equality. I will discuss these values in turn in the stated order.
Self-realization and autonomy Self-realization describes the successful externalization of something deemed internal, namely those aspects of the self which the realization realizes. As a value, self-realization presumably regards such externalization as a good thing, and for a variety of possible reasons: because it brings personal pleasure, because it is an authentic expression of an
What do Socialists Want? 31
inner nature (perhaps a human nature), because this is the kind of thing we were put on the earth to do, and so on. There is an emphasis on the desirability of following one’s personal bent and expressing one’s abilities to the limit. It is an activist (and an activist’s?) conception, oriented to performance and achievement, as opposed to passive consumption and mute contemplation.5 Self-realization is a demand made against the subjection to external compulsion and the narrowness of life chances. In Marx, social conditions block self-realization for the majority, but not necessarily for the privileged minority. Hence one purpose of revolution (or goal of social development) is to remove these social barriers: to generalize the opportunities of self-expression and self-development which have hitherto been confined to a small elite. This view is somewhat paradoxical, if one thinks of the etymological contrast between socialism and individualism. Here is a socialist value that would curtail social pressures in order that individuals should flourish. But the more serious problems with it lie elsewhere. First, if selfrealization is regarded as a good, does this positive evaluation extend to every possible kind of self that might be realized, including conventionally pathological ones? I have implied that demands for selfrealization within the socialist tradition have tended to go along with certain conceptions of the good life: the proletariat is oppressed by its lack of access to good books, or education, or classical music, not by its inability to afford an offshore power boat. But if we reject this potential bias in favour of something that is neutral with respect to conceptions of the good life, must we go the whole libertarian hog and accept paedophilia as a form of self-realization? The second main problem is that, precisely since self-realization is ultimately a matter for the individual, it is not clear whether it is a value that can figure as a political demand. A value such as democracy can be institutionalized in terms of, say, one person, one vote. It is not obvious that ‘from each according to ability’ can be institutionalized in the same way. If this is so, then the most that can be done is to aim at social conditions that will promote self-realization, rather than aim for self-realization itself. And here the main requirement would seem to be autonomy, regarded as the state of a person in which their goals in life are self-chosen. In (nearly) John Gray’s words: By autonomy is meant the condition in which a person can be at least part author of her life, in that she has before her a range of worthwhile options, in respect of which her choices are not fettered by coercion and with regard to which she possesses the capacities
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and resources presupposed by a reasonable measure of success in her self-chosen path among these options.6 It is because a forced authorship is no authorship at all that a society, state, or political movement cannot with consistency make it a social obligation to be author of one’s own life. The most it can and should do is to help and encourage, but also hope and anticipate, that people will become self-realizing when they are given the appropriate conditions, which will no doubt include ‘the capacities and resources presupposed by a reasonable measure of success in [the] self-chosen path’. For this reason I suggest that socialists should advocate autonomy as a value, rather than self-realization.7 But this reorientation has a further benefit, since it also helps to resolve the first problem noted in relation to self-realization. Autonomy is neutral with respect to conceptions of the good life, since it does not specify which goals people will choose, only that they be freely-chosen. But this does not leave the field for potential self-expressions entirely open. First, autonomy would prohibit self-realizations which denied autonomy to others. This would almost certainly rule out paedophilia. Second, a decline in pathology might be an empirical consequence of the spread of autonomy: would anyone freely choose paedophilia? Here it is at least suggestive that patterns of abuse seem to follow histories of being abused. Third, autonomy as a value is focused on individual choice, and therefore self-control. While it is a more familiar move within the socialist tradition to emphasize external social compulsions as the antithesis of personal autonomy, the same contrast presumably exists with respect to internal compulsions. It is being a slave which is the problem, whether this is being a slave in one’s social situation or in the face of one’s uncontrollable desires. This suggests that there is a normative conception of the self at back of socialist demands.8 If the cultural relativity is stripped out of the received socialist conception of self-realization, the autonomy that remains must be valued largely because it is required for self-determination. This makes autonomy the most appropriate individualistic value for a socialist to hold.
Community as form of social life I have chosen community as the name for the communally-oriented socialist value, in preference to fraternity (for obvious reasons) or
What do Socialists Want? 33
communism or solidarity (for slightly less obvious reasons). In Taylor’s influential definition community involves three elements: (i) shared values and beliefs (ii) direct and many-sided relations (iii) practices of reciprocity.9 Community in this definition is a type of social organization characterized by these three features. So, to regard community as a value is presumably to endorse this type of social organization as desirable, and to aim at creating socialist society in its image. There are a number of difficulties with this project. It is true that the historical strength of the socialist movement has often depended on actually existing communities. Working class communities are the most important and obvious examples, though one should not forget the role of ethnic and immigrant communities (such as the Jewish communities in North America) or the fact that Communism in the West used to run in families. But the fact that socialism has been nurtured in community does not mean that it is easy (or even possible) to create or extend socialist community as a deliberate act of policy, or that every aspect of community is desirable as a socialist goal. Taking the three elements in turn, it is difficult to know first of all what to make of the demand for shared values and beliefs. This element is there to emphasize that communities require what the Credit Union movement calls a ‘common bond’.10 This must certainly be shared, but to say it consists only in ‘values and beliefs’ is perhaps to take too narrow and cognitive a view: common emotional responses are critical to the sustenance of common bonds. But what common bonds are necessary for socialist community? The obvious answer is ‘socialist common bonds’, meaning shared socialist values, beliefs and emotional responses, but this recipe for a community of socialists may not be the only, or even the best, recipe for socialist community. As part of its Enlightenment heritage, socialism in some parts has aimed at a full self-consciousness of social relationships, which would here involve a transparency about the mechanisms which keep a community in being. Such transparency has sometimes been commended to the socialist movement under concepts such as prefiguration and critical praxis, but it remains a moot point whether an explicit adherence to socialist values is necessary to sustain a form of social organization which exemplifies the values. Egalitarianism, such as exists
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for example in the so-called Big Man societies, can be sustained on the basis of a whole variety of secular or religious ideologies and myths making no explicit reference to egalitarian principles, and a similar point goes for common bonds based on identities of occupation, age, class, ethnicity or gender. There is also the problem that some socialist values – such as individual autonomy – pull against the demands of solidarity. How to integrate individualism into a moral order capable of holding together society is a question confronted head on by Durkheim, and although socialists are unlikely to be impressed even by his clearest and most original suggestion in response (the idea of contractual solidarity), it is not obvious that they have any better answers, even after a century’s opportunity for further reflection.11 It therefore remains an open question whether socialists can or should set out to create a nexus of shared values and beliefs – probably based either on socialist values, or on symbols of those values – simply as a means of creating socialist community. One of the lessons of the Cultural Revolution is that the attempt to engineer new social relations around slogans of political correctness may do worse than fail, since its effects may undermine the existing moral strength of the socialist community.12 The second element of the definition of community – direct and many-sided relations – expresses the character of social relationships which are unmediated, by for example cash transactions, bureaucratic interventions or professionalizations, and well-rounded, in that in a community one tends to encounter the same people on many occasions in a variety of different social roles, rather than a string of different people on single occasions, each time within a specific social role. Relations in a community are dense, interwoven and concrete, as opposed to being attenuated, fragmented and abstract, as in the stereotypical contrast of the country with the city. The desirability of community lies in its satisfying the need to belong, to be the known member of a specific group rather than an anonymous face in the crowd.13 There is no doubt that this emphasis acts as an important counterweight to other overurban values within the socialist tradition – its regimental tradition of centralization, bureaucracy, and the worship of scale – but this does not mean that community in this sense can or should be espoused as a central socialist value. First, whether it is desirable to be known depends on what is known about you, and there can be advantages in escaping to the anonymity of the city. Second, whether it is desirable to have dense and unmediated relationships depends on the quality of those relationships:
What do Socialists Want? 35
community can be a prison as much as a home. Third, for reasons of simple physical economy the numbers of people with whom one can be in community are limited, probably to a few hundreds at most. All that community-minded socialists could demand would therefore be the creation of a large number of distinct communities, not a single socialist community. And in view of the foregoing discussion, any enthusiasm for community building needs to be tempered in at least three ways: (a) socialists should aim at the creation of the social conditions for the evolution of communities, rather than aim directly at the creation of communities themselves14 (b) the ideal of community to which socialists adhere should be structured to contain various escape clauses and transfer rules to protect individual members: direct and many-sided relations are a mixed blessing15 and (c) given that there are many communities, care must also be taken that inter-communal relationships respect all the other socialist values, and community formation does not give rise to new mechanisms of social conflict and social exclusion.
Community and reciprocity The final element in Taylor’s definition of community is reciprocity. This is almost certainly the key value in this area, but it requires a careful analysis. The initial difficulty is that all market transactions are based precisely on reciprocity of a kind, arising from mutual advantage: I buy because I would rather have what you have offered for sale at a given price; you sell because you would rather have the price. If communal reciprocity is to come out as distinct from market reciprocity, some basis must be found for the distinction. And the mere fact that market transactions are monetarized is unlikely to do the trick. Consider the case of neighbours who perform various services for each other on an informal basis – keeping an eye on an empty house, borrowing the garden roller, baby-sitting in emergencies, and so on. Perhaps no money changes hands, but the behaviour is perfectly compatible with what one might call ‘the capitalist mentality’ of instrumental self-seeking that classically informs market behaviour. This is because practices of reciprocity can easily arise from conditional strategies, of which the type-case is the strategy of Tit-for-Tat: I co-operate only in so far as, and so long as, my self-interest is served by your reciprocation.16 These considerations suggest that the distinction between market and community should be made in terms of motivations, and this is indeed the approach taken by Jerry Cohen in ‘Back to Socialist Basics’. ‘Community’ is defined, he says, as ‘the anti-market principle according to
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which I serve you not because of what I can get out of doing so but because you need my service’, and the line of thought is later amplified as follows: The market, any market, contradicts the principle which not only Marx but his socialist predecessors proclaimed for the good society, the principle embodied in the slogan ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ One might ask what it means for each to give according to his ability, and what it means for each to get according to his needs. But for present purposes, the unambiguous message of the slogan is that what you get is not a function of what you give, that contribution and benefit are separate matters. Here the relationship between people is not the instrumental one in which I give because I get, but the wholly noninstrumental one in which I give because you need. You do not get more because you produce more, and you do not get less because you are no good at producing. Accordingly, the ideal in the primeval socialist slogan constitutes a complete rejection of the logic of the market.17 In this view, then, the socialist ideal of community involves ‘wholly non-instrumental’ other-regarding motivations that contrast sharply with the self-regarding motives of market-oriented behaviour. Although Cohen does not state this as such, it is plausible to infer that community is regarded as a value because the former motivation is ethically more appealing that the latter – it represents a higher form of social organization. And it is this higher form that Marx denotes by the ‘primeval socialist slogan’: ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’. I will take issue with this view on a number of points, beginning with Cohen’s analysis of the primeval slogan. Given Cohen’s view that communal contributions proceed from an appreciation of the needs of the other, it does not seem correct that ‘contribution and benefit are separate matters’ within the socialist community, since my contribution is geared directly to your benefit. In fact, the slogan best expressing the intended motivational principle would seem to be ‘from each according to the other’s need’. Is this consistent with ‘the primeval socialist slogan’ itself ? Perhaps so, if ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’ is construed as something like ‘from each according to the other’s need to the best of her ability’. But this seems a forced way of interpreting the primeval slogan.
What do Socialists Want? 37
A more natural interpretation in my view is to think that the slogan really does intend to separate the contribution and benefit sides of the allocative equation. ‘From each according to ability’ is a statement of the principle of self-realization (qv) and ‘to each according to need’ is indeed a statement of provision by need, but without reference to the contributions out of which the provision is to be met. Under this interpretation, the primeval slogan does not authorize Cohen’s communal principle. To see the difference, imagine the case of brain surgery. A communal brain surgeon will be motivated to use her skills by the patient’s need for surgery. A brain surgeon acting under the self-realizing principle ‘from each according to ability’ will be motivated by the need to exercise the skill. It may of course be queried how communist society would survive without any apparent mechanism for matching contributions to benefits. But it should be recalled that the slogan occurs in the midst of a passage in which Marx is waxing lyrical about a future stage of technological development in which productivity is essentially infinite (‘all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly’).18 In this situation, no economic co-ordination is required, since one can effectively pick one’s brain surgery off the trees, like everything else one might need. I conclude that Cohen’s communal principle does not have the straightforward classical warrant he claims for it. This conclusion does not of itself make Cohen’s principle unsound, or indeed unsocialist, but I think that there are other reasons for calling it into question as one of the principal socialist values. Imagine a society – a community of saints – in which Cohen’s ‘wholly uninstrumental’ principle holds sway. Such a society is certainly coherent sociologically, because while no saint is oriented whatsoever to the service of his or her own needs, each saint is surrounded by other saints who are thus oriented, and it may be assumed that all the saints’ needs are met by way of the services rendered to each saint by other saints. But I am not persuaded that such a society – which just is a community according to Cohen’s definition – is coherent morally. I am reminded of Elster’s celebrated point that altruism is parasitic on egoism, since the altruist’s motivation requires the other to be satisfied egoistically.19 This point can be dramatized by the Christians’ dilemma. Two Christians get on a bus, and there is only one seat left. The first Christian says ‘after you’, and the second Christian says ‘No, after you’. The normative implication of Elster’s point is that if altruism is good because it attends to the self-interests of others, it is difficult to see that self-interest can be bad in itself. But if self-interest is not bad in
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itself, what makes my self-interest worse than your self-interest? Far from resting on a sublime moral principle, Cohen’s ‘wholly uninstrumental’ ideal of community seems almost perverse, since it allows me to attend to everyone’s self-interest in the world apart from my own. If one imagines a spectrum of motivations from the wholly instrumental to the wholly uninstrumental, the socialist stricture on the market is not that the market rules out a wholly uninstrumental motivation but that it shamelessly promotes a wholly instrumental one. It is the relentless and exclusive pursuit of self-interest which is the problem under capitalism, and the lack of balance in the relative considerations of self versus others, not the existence or pursuit of self-interest per se. Consider as an example the UK Blood Transfusion Service, a byword for communal provision resting entirely on non-monetarized voluntary contributions. A wholly instrumental person will not give blood since blood transfusion is guaranteed whether or not a person has donated (the egoistic blood-user in a world of altruistic donors is a classic freerider). A wholly altruistic person will give blood unconditionally. A partly-altruistic person will give blood in the generalized expectation of return in case of need, but without specific assurances (particularly contractual rights) on this score. One might ask whether the typical motive of the UK Blood donor is wholly altruistic or only partly so. One test is to imagine what would happen if the rules were changed so that donors were told that once they had made a donation they would no longer be eligible to receive blood. Wholly altruistic people would continue to donate, since they are moved exclusively by a concern for others. Partly altruistic people would cease to donate, since the new rule would violate the generalized expectation of reciprocity. I cannot prove the point, but my strong intuition is that if such a rule were announced, the supply of blood would dry up fairly rapidly. Richard Titmuss certainly drew the following magisterial conclusion from his extensive survey data: None of the donor’s answers was purely altruistic. . . . no donor type can be depicted in terms of complete, disinterested, spontaneous altruism. There must be some sense of obligation, approval and interest; some feeling of ‘inclusion’ in society; some awareness of need and the purposes of the gift. What was seen by these donors as a good for strangers in the here-and-now could be (they said or implied) a good for themselves – indeterminately one day. But it was not a good which they positively desired for themselves either immediately or ultimately.
What do Socialists Want? 39
In certain undesired circumstances in the future – situations in which death or disability might be postponable – then the performance by a stranger of a similar action would constitute for them or their families a desired good. But they had no assurance of such action nor any guarantee of the continued existence of the National Health Service. Unlike gift-exchange in traditional societies, there is in the free gift of blood to unnamed strangers no contract of custom, no legal bond, no functional determinism, no situations of discriminatory power, domination, constraint, or compulsion, no sense of shame or guilt, no gratitude imperative and no need for the penitence of Chrysostom.20 I conclude that Cohen has overegged the pudding, and that what socialists concerned with motivation should advocate under the heading of community is not altruism per se, but the existence of an appropriate balance between egoistic and altruistic motivations, of the type which market relationships always threaten to undermine, and which Titmuss describes above so eloquently in his homily on blood. Socialist reciprocity should thus be confined to the lower half of Table 2.1. I say nothing further about what the most desirable balance between egoism and altruism should be, or even how the balance might be measured. I only note that if this motivational attribute is still regarded as the criterion of community, we have come a long way from the first two dimensions of Michael Taylor’s definition, and the characterization of community as a form of social organization. There is nothing which pins down mixed motivations to small scales of society, or to direct and many-sided relationships. The Blood Transfusion Service is national in scope and anonymous in operation. Indeed, a large part of Titmuss’s case is that reciprocity can be mobilized in the service of complete strangers. But at least the root contrast of socialism with individualism appears more apt – socialism involves a practical concern for the interests of individuals beside oneself.
Table 2.1 Four forms of reciprocity
Wholly self-interested Partly altruistic
Monetarized
Non-monetarized
The market Welfare taxation
Tit for tat reciprocity The gift relationship
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Motivations and norms I wish now to raise a more fundamental doubt about a previous premise, and query whether motivation should be the central focus of discussion regarding community. I am sure it is the case that the UK blood donor system exhibits a good deal of altruistic behaviour, whereas, say, the US system of commercial provision probably entails a good deal of grubby capitalist manoeuvring, but these motivational differences are not absolutely mandated by the respective systems in place. A person may sell blood in the United States because it is the only way to raise the cash to pay for the transfusion required by a sick relative, and a person might donate blood in the UK out of a sense of social ambition – to be the person who had given the most, say, in the previous year. Alternatively, the motives might be purely conventional, and the adage ‘when in Rome’ apply. In that case the different systems in the two countries could be reproduced quite happily without there being any difference in the underlying motivations between the two systems – in either situation, one simply does ‘the done thing’. The theoretical point is that to make too close a connection between community and motivation – and indeed to make the improvement of motivation a socialist aim – is to make too direct a connection between motivation and behaviour, and to abstract from the social context of the behaviour. Specifically, what the respective blood supply systems establish in the first instance are sets of social norms – in one case communal; in the other case market-oriented. Each of these systems has attached to it various social sanctions, and the social rules together with the sanctions create an incentive structure, to which differently motivated individuals will respond differentially. Thus, the norm yielding community as a social form is something like ‘everyone takes their fair share in collective initiatives’, whereas the norm yielding market behaviour is something like ‘buy cheap and sell dear’.21 The exclusively self-oriented person living under a communal norm will tend to kick against the constraints, trying to minimize their contributions and maximize their benefits, but the social sanctions of disapproval, ostracism and so on may nevertheless be strong enough to keep the behaviour of the instrumentally oriented member in line with the expectations of the bulk of the community. Conversely, the business person blessed (or afflicted) with altruistic motivation in a dog-eatdog world may well be brought into line from the other direction, by ridicule at their other-worldliness, or in the last resort through bankruptcy. Thus one can imagine a kind of equilibrium, in which any given
What do Socialists Want? 41
norm is sustainable under a range of motivations giving rise to behaviour, but in which there is a closer fit between some norms and some sets of motivations than in other cases: communal norms are reinforced by, and in turn promote, part-altruistic behaviour; market norms likewise with instrumental self-seeking. Should socialists aiming for community then focus their attention on the norms or on the motivations? My inclination is to go for the norms, partly because it is easier to change the social rules than to change the personal dispositions. In this view, socialism does not aim directly to make people better people, but rather to institute better social rules, such that people are placed in social circumstances that are likely to draw out the better sides of their existing natures.22
Democracy and self-determination I will try out the idea that democracy should be to the collective interest what autonomy is to the individual interest. Democracy is the expression of the idea of self-determination that is appropriate to decisions which touch many lives, as opposed to decisions which involve one life alone.23 It is presumably a value for the same reason that autonomy is a value: the desirability of controlling one’s life extends to those aspects of life which must be controlled in common. The socialist slogan would therefore be ‘public democracy, private autonomy’ and these two demands would not be in competition with one another because each is the outgrowth of a single underlying value – self-determination. To pursue the discussion further we need at least an elementary sketch of the distribution of power within a society. Begin then with an image of the total power within a society, what might be called its total executive mass, and envisage a partition of this mass among a series of decision-making units, each with exclusive jurisdiction over a particular executive area. Some of these decision-making units will be single human individuals, making (autonomous) decisions within an area thereby regarded as constituting a private domain; other decisionmaking units will involve two or more people in a larger unit. The partition of executive authority among these units must be disjoint and exhaustive: there must be no overlap between jurisdictions, and there must be some unit empowered to take every decision that needs to be taken. Note however that this executive partition does not induce a partition among persons: each person will in general be a member of a number of such decision-making units, as an individual, a member of a family, an employee, a club member, a shareholder, a citizen, and so
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forth. Nor is it necessarily the case that every person is a member of at least one such unit: chattel slaves and children of traditional families are denied executive participation. On the other hand, (adult) members of a society that has instituted individual autonomy will be members of at least one such unit – that corresponding to their area of individual autonomy. These individual areas are deemed private, as has been indicated, but it is not quite the case that all non-individual areas are public; two consenting adults may constitute a relevant executive unit in the area of sexual relations, for example, which may be regarded as private when viewed from the outside, but as a miniature bipolar republic when viewed from within. Given such a distribution of power, two obvious complications arise: first, the problem of the boundaries between units and second, the problem of the internal structure of each unit. The first complication appears to be insoluble by democracy, though the second is more tractable. The difficulty presented by the boundary problem is the difficulty of drawing up criteria for fixing the boundaries of executive units in a democracy. It might be thought, for example, that the boundary could be determined on the consequentialist basis suggested at the head of this section: democracy requires that all those affected by a decision should be able to take part in it. But consider the organ transplant problem: potential recipients are certainly affected by the decision – indeed, it may well be a matter of life and death for them – but they do not thereby earn the right to take part in the organ provision decision. This presumably rests entirely with the potential donors, who have exclusive rights over their body parts. Unless the area of individual autonomy is so restricted that it excludes all actions with effects on other individuals, we must live with the consequences of numerous decisions in which we have no right to participate. The point has been made in relation to individual autonomy, but a parallel argument applies in relation to collective decision-making units: it is practically impossible, and may not be desirable in principle, to participate (however indirectly) in all the human decisions which shape our lives.24 The effects of such decisions cannot therefore be used as a criterion to establish the appropriate democratic memberships of decision-making bodies. If the consequentialist criterion does not work as a general means of fixing boundaries, it is not obvious that there is any other criterion available to do the job. Democracy says, roughly speaking, that if there is a problem, vote on it; but this principle can hardly be applied to the
What do Socialists Want? 43
problem of where the boundary of an executive unit should be, since this determines who is eligible to take part in the vote. Consider the situation in Northern Ireland. It is one of the characteristics of the Northern Ireland conflict that all parties to it represent themselves as democratic, and with roughly equal justification, since each party to the conflict can point to a geographical constituency whose majority view the party represents. If we skate over some minor difficulties, such as the fact that on the Republican side the last time the people of Ireland as a whole were officially asked their opinion was 80 years ago, or on the Unionist side that despite their aspiration of Union with the UK, they are not anxious to include the whole population of the UK in the decision about whether the Union should be maintained, we may assume that a Northern Ireland referendum will have always favoured the Union, whereas an All Ireland referendum will have always favoured Irish reunification and independence. Suppose we wish to decide democratically whether the referendum on the constitutional position of Northern Ireland should take place within the six counties of Northern Ireland or the thirty-two counties of Ireland as a whole, how do we proceed? Should we ask people just within the six counties, or in all thirty-two? Clearly, the result of any constitutional referendum, or any referendum on the proper scope of the referendum (and so on ad infinitum) is determined by the initial choice of electorate, and this choice is by definition not a democratic decision. This problem is a general one, which will arise whenever people contest whose business it is to take a certain decision. Whichever contesting group is allowed to take the decision on whose business it is will make it their business, as opposed to the business of the other group. So there is no democratic meta-criterion to which one can appeal to decide the problem of jurisdiction among the contesting groups. This might be called the Ulster paradox. The fundamental conclusion is that the boundary problem is underdetermined by democratic considerations, which is a way of saying that it is determined by extrademocratic considerations.25 In the socialist context, the layout of executive units will be determined partly by other socialist values, and especially equality. This is why a socialist democracy will differ from a liberal democracy, say, or conservative democracy. I assume now that the boundary problem is resolved: we have a certain distribution of executive units covering every decision made in the society. To insist on democracy in such a society is to insist that the internal structure is democratic of each executive unit involving two or more people. The intention behind this demand is clear – to equalize
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intra-unit power, regardless of inter-unit disparities of power – and the means to achieve it is also fairly clear. On the one hand, there must certainly be procedures for aggregating preferences on the basis of equal weightings: in formal systems, one member, one vote (call this OMOV1). But this is not enough. Democracy is a matter of ethos and practices as well as rules and procedures. There must be not only participatory institutions but a participatory culture, so that the formal democratic process is not dominated and manipulated by the few. Genuine efforts must be made to create a climate in which the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ can prevail, and in which elites are not able to use information to strategic effect. Jennifer Hornsby has for example argued that demands for free speech must be accompanied by demands for equal speech, and that social barriers to voice are not dissimilar in kind to the barriers preventing access in non-vocal areas of social life.26 Certainly in my experience there is a distinction between cognitive democrats and cognitive authoritarians that tends to cut across conventional left-right distinctions. We might label this Habermasian requirement for cognitive democracy as One Member, One Voice or OMOV2.27 Democracy in this view is not simply about making the state democratic, in the sense of both OMOV1 and OMOV2, but about making the society democratic in the same senses, so that every one of its constituent power centres from families upwards operates in an open fashion inclusive of its members. It goes without saying that this would be a great deal more than we have already, but it is also a long way short of what a socialist might want, since it is compatible with distributions of power among power centres that socialists might oppose for other reasons. A fully democratized society might for example be a liberal capitalist society in which there were unlimited accumulations of private wealth, so long as all the relevant shareholders meetings were fully democratic and observed the principle of One Member One Vote, as opposed to the current system of One Monetary Unit, One Vote (OMOV3?). Democracy is an indispensable socialist value, but it cannot by itself define the contours of a socialist society.
Equality of outcome and equality of opportunity If the family of socialist values had a Head of Household, it would no doubt be equality, except that equality rules out heads of household. Socialism certainly rests on a deep intuition that gross inequalities of social condition are indefensible, and that a socialist society is one without social divisions of class, nation, gender, race, age or disability.
What do Socialists Want? 45
The obvious grounding for equality as a social value is a conviction concerning the fundamental equivalence of each human being, notwithstanding the evident differences between them. To turn the conviction into the value, however, a further step is required, to the effect that justice requires fundamentally equal beings to be treated fundamentally equally. And here we encounter a certain irony. Amartya Sen has argued persuasively that every serious theory of justice, including those which might justify gross inequalities of social condition, rely on some conception of equality.28 Theories of justice typically (or perhaps inevitably) list a finite number of differentiating factors in terms of which it is justified to treat people differently. But this defines a complementary set of factors (that is, all those possible factors missing from the earlier list) in terms of which the theory tacitly recommends treating people the same. This complementary list defines the concept of equality for the theory in question. So what started out as allegedly distinctive of socialism – commitment to an ideal of social equality – turns out not to be so distinctive after all. What may be distinctive is at most the kind of equality that is advocated, and possibly also the degree of it, so that among egalitarian theories of justice, socialist theories are more egalitarian than others. In order to preserve their motivating intuition socialist theories of justice should for example be sufficiently egalitarian to rule out the gross inequalities we observe in terms of class, nation, gender, race, age and disability. A traditional approach on the left is to say that some phenomenon of social division is either oppressive (being an unjust exclusion) or exploitative (being an unjustly unequal exchange), and that it should therefore be opposed on one of these counts. But it only has to be asked why the phenomenon is oppressive or exploitative to see that the normative judgement must refer back to some (egalitarian) theory of justice which either makes it unjust to exclude a person who should be included, or makes unjust a given unequal exchange. Socialism cannot do without an egalitarian theory of social justice.29 I will say less on this topic than on some of the others not because there is less to say, but because it has been said more ably elsewhere, in the intensive engagement of the last 15 years between Analytical Marxists and left liberal political philosophers, and in two characteristically impressive recent volumes from John Roemer.30 The fundamental idea is that the remedy for unequal social outcomes is to equalize the social conditions that lead to the outcomes, thereby equalising the outcomes. Justice will prevail when and only when the correct social conditions
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have been sufficiently equalized, and this equalization should be the goal of socialist policy. This goal has traditionally centred around the property distribution and its associated inequalities, leading to a politics of social class. But if inequality is the underlying target, there is no reason to stop there. Indeed, any factor which enters into unequal social outcomes may be fair game for this approach, including not only those of external circumstances (poverty, family background, educational opportunities and so on) but of internal dispositions (abilities, attitudes, preferences, values, even genes). Now I take it that all Marxists (and probably most socialists) are philosophical materialists. In this view, every event, including every human action, has a set of physical causes which determines the outcome. If we are able to specify all the internal and external causes of social inequality, then they will determine the outcome without residue. It then appears to follow from a conjunction of philosophical materialism with socialist egalitarianism that socialist policy must aim to equalize the effect of every contributory factor. In that case, socialism would appear to be committed to some version of welfare egalitarianism, implying a complete equality of final condition. I have argued elsewhere that some such a view appears to provide the normative foundation for Marx’s discussion in The Critique of the Gotha Programme (in so far as that discussion has such a foundation), including of course Cohen’s ‘primeval slogan’: from each according to ability, to each according to need.31 The problem with this view is that it fails to take any account of personal responsibility, since society will have a duty to compensate any welfare deficit whatever, regardless of how it is caused. The view that has emerged strongly from the recent debates is that this position takes egalitarianism a bridge too far. Pragmatically, the effect of espousing welfare egalitarianism is to deliver the whole rhetoric of responsibility and choice to the political right, thereby weakening the left in political debate.32 But there is a more principled reason for taking ‘responsibility’ seriously. It would seem to be entailed by the concept of autonomy, as the other side of the freedom autonomy provides. To be autonomous is precisely to be responsible for the autonomous choices one makes. In so far as socialists espouse autonomy (or self-determination) as a value, it would be inconsistent for them to expect society to compensate people for the effects of their autonomous choices. This is an area in which there will be inequality as a natural consequence of the operation of socialism, and indeed, the more autonomy there is in society,
What do Socialists Want? 47
the more inequality one might expect as a consequence (all other things being equal, which of course they would be). This argument sets up what one might think of as a normative superstructure for a causal social theory. Among those factors causing various kinds of unequal social outcome, there are (a) factors deemed subject to equalization and (b) factors deemed not subject to equalization. Theories of justice will then differ according to the place they make the cut between these two kinds of factor, and the reasons that they make the cut in one place rather than another. One important distinction is that between theories which include only external resources in the equalising category, and those which also include internal resources, such as abilities, IQ and so on. The former theories include those of John Rawls, Amartya Sen, and Serge-Christophe Kolm, which differ among themselves about which list of external resources should be equalized, which index of personal well-being society should aim to maximize, and which criteria of maximization should be deployed.33 The latter theories, of which Dworkin’s is regarded as the prototype, involves two main conceptual developments. First, since internal resources inhere in individuals they cannot be physically equalized, but they can be compensated for, by devoting larger relative amounts of other (external) resources to those who are relatively poorer in the internal resource. This is part of what it means to allocate according to need in the context of differential needs.34 Second, if the line between (a) factors and (b) factors no longer coincides with the line between external and internal factors, it must be drawn on some other basis. In current theories, the line is drawn roughly between factors over which the individual can be deemed to have control, and factors beyond their control. Socialist society equalizes (or compensates for) the latter, but not for the former factors. To see what this might mean in practice, return to the case of brain surgery. Causal social theory holds that skill in brain surgery is the product of three factors: natural ability, educational resources, and selfchosen effort. An egalitarian society will devote its available educational resources to compensate for differences in natural ability in such a way that people who make the same effort will achieve the same level of skill. This inevitably involves giving those of lesser ability proportionately more of the educational resource. A consequence of this approach is of course that, given a particular educational resource (that is, a fixed budget to spend on training brain surgeons), socialist society will create a less skilled complement of brain surgeons than a meritocracy in which
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the available resource is concentrated on those with the greatest natural ability. Although it is not exactly unfamiliar in Britain to give those with lesser talents a disproportionate share of the educational resource for social reasons (the arrangement is known as the Public School System), the moral of the tale is that the requirements of egalitarian justice may well come with a price tag in terms of efficiency. The wider implication of this point is that considerations of justice do not necessarily settle the policy issue, since one needs to put efficiency considerations in the same frame as justice, and it is a matter of judgement in a particular case how much injustice one might wish to tolerate in return for efficiency in the use of resources (in this case, efficiency in the development of internal resources). It might be that maximizing the output skills of brain surgery overrides considerations of input equality. And the point is that one cannot blink this judgement, since loss of efficiency is entailed by (this conception of ) equality.35 Let us assume nevertheless that we have instituted full equality (possibly at the expense of efficiency). The proposition held out to the individual by this kind of social arrangement is roughly as follows: we have made your position in society as equal as we can, taking account of all the relevant barriers we can think of. Now you make of your situation what you will, and live by the consequences. In this sense, it is an equal opportunities theory, but it is one that potentially cuts very deep. John Roemer makes the distinction between the non-discrimination principle and the level-the-playing-field principle as different ways of spelling out the concept of equal opportunities.36 Non-discrimination is the sense in which ‘equal opportunities’ is used in the policies of many institutions these days. Although these policies are of great value, and the institutions that have them are much improved as a result, nondiscrimination would rightly attract the criticism from the left that it implies at most the equalization of access to highly unequal positions. The level-the-playing-field conception goes much further than this, since it potentially embraces all the background and current factors beyond a person’s control that affect their performance at work (or indeed in any other social role). In Roemer’s formal treatment, the only variable to remain within a person’s control is the amount of effort they expend, and even this is indexed to their social group, so it is the degree of effort compared with those in a like social situation which is taken account of, not the absolute level of effort made.37 With such a large view of its acreage, levelling the playing field would undoubtedly involve a vast redistribution of resources, of the kind that is part and parcel of the traditional socialist agenda.
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Take as an example capitalism in the literal sense. Under a market system, the possession of money capital confers an income with very little effort. This is of course the basis of the traditional socialist hostility to the rentier classes, and the traditional response has been to propose the abolition of the market mechanism for investment in favour of some form of central planning. But if the objection to rentier capitalism is equality-based, and the market mechanism is desirable for other reasons (perhaps because no one has figured out how to run the investment function of a complex economy along the lines of Titmuss’s Gift Relationship), then the traditional objection to rentier capitalism can be met not by abolishing the capital market, but by equalising the possession of capital. Roemer has in fact made a proposal of just this kind, in which the investment market is run on a competitive basis, but is sequestered from other monetary transactions in a special coupon economy.38 Each young person on reaching maturity is then given an aliquot part of the coupons representing the assets of all corporations, which he or she is subsequently free to invest in particular companies, yielding an income in real money. On death, one’s shares revert to the Treasury, to prevent inequalities building up through family bequests, and so on. Notice the homology with other application of ‘deep’ equal opportunities thinking: one is given the opportunity to draw down an (unearned) income by the provision of the financial resources enabling one to do so. But what one makes of this is entirely up to you, and society will presumably tolerate the inequalities among individuals arising from poor investment decisions.39 The main point of introducing the example of the coupon economy is not however to defend a specific proposal, but to illustrate the potential sweep of equal opportunities thinking. If we were truly to give everyone an equal chance, it is very doubtful that capitalism could survive in anything like its current forms, and it is certain that social divisions would become a thing of the past. Levelling the playing field will profoundly effect the permissible layout of executive units in the society, and thus the contours of the institutions within which democratic decision-making will take place.
Four core values? The discussion began with four putative socialist values, and they have all survived, but in some cases in an amended or refined form. Self-determination seems to cover what is crucial in both self-realization
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and democracy, and autonomy is preferable as a socialist goal to selfrealization per se. Community is a problematic notion: it is not clear whether it refers to a general form of social life on the one hand, or to principles of reciprocal action on the other, and in the latter guise, it is not clear whether community is characterized by altruistic motivations, by equitable rules of social interaction, or a combination of the two. Equality is vital, and what is meant by it is equality of opportunity for welfare. In view of the relations among all these values, it is possible that the socialist commitment reduces to the demand for selfdetermination under conditions of egalitarian social justice. But short of a utopia of communist abundance, the claims of social justice may need to be weighed against the requirements of efficient social organization.
Notes 1. Department of Interdisciplinary Human Studies, University of Bradford, Bradford BD7 1DP, UK. I should like to thank Paul Wetherly and John Allcock for their comments on an earlier draft, and the participants in discussions of the papers given under this title at the Edge Hill Conference of the PSA Marxism Group and at the LSE Political Theory Seminar in September and October 1998. 2. G. A. Cohen, ‘Back to Socialist Basics’, New Left Review 207, Sept./Oct. 1994, 3–16. Cf. ‘a . . . response to the present predicament is to think the values afresh in a spirit of loyalty to them and in order to see how one can sustain commitment to them in an inhospitable time, and what new modes of advocacy of them are possible’ (p. 8). This chapter‘s title was inspired by John Roemer, A Future for Socialism (London, Verso, 1994) Ch. 1 and the chapter extends the politics-and-values half of my argument in ‘Analytical and Essential Marxism’, Political Studies 45/4, Sept. 1997, 768–83. 3. ‘Our values do not change. Our commitment to a different vision of society stands intact. But the ways of achieving that vision must change.’ Tony Blair, speech to ‘Faith in the City’ Conference, cited in Stephen Driver and Luke Martell, New Labour (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998) p. 27. 4. For further analysis of the value commitments of New Labour, see ‘New Labour’s Polity: Tony Giddens and the “Third Way” ’, Imprints 3/3, Spring 1999, 214–42. Copies of Imprints are available from the author at the address given above. 5. But think of Nirvana (either the rock group or the spiritual condition). Can self-(ab)negation be a form of self-realization? 6. The Moral Foundations of Market Institutions (London, IEA Health and Welfare Unit, 1992) p. 22. I have feminized the personal pronouns throughout in order to avoid the conventional sexism of the original. I should also emphasize that I am not endorsing Gray’s treatment of autonomy by endorsing his definition of it. At the time of writing the IEA booklet Gray believed in autonomy, and believed that the market upheld it. A short time later he began to doubt the value, and came to the conviction that the market undermined it. This was just one episode in a complicated evolution which has led him
What do Socialists Want? 51
7.
8. 9. 10.
11. 12.
13.
14.
most recently to present himself as a guru of New Labour. One difficulty with deciding how much influence John Gray has had on New Labour is to determine which of the many theoretical incarnations of John Gray may have had the influence. I have tried to sketch the changing faces of John Gray in ‘Prosperity, Autonomy and Community: John Gray on the Market, Politics and Values’, Imprints 1/1, June 1996, 26–45. I listed self-realization as one of the primary socialist values in ‘Analytical and Essential Marxism’, and this is modified by the current suggestion. John Roemer speaks of self-realization as ‘a specifically Marxist conception of human flourishing’, but then cites ‘equality of opportunity for selfrealization and welfare’ as the socialist desideratum. This move from equality to equality of opportunity parallels the move here from self-realization to autonomy. See note 2, p. 11. There is a certain tension within Analytical Marxism between the more puritan advocates of self-realization, and the more liberal advocates of an autonomy without determinate social or cultural content. One test issue is the attitude towards Basic Income proposals, which for example Jon Elster has strongly opposed, and autonomists will tend to support. Needless to say, New Labour is much closer to the puritan than the liberal position in this respect. And this incidentally seems to make postmodernism incompatible with socialism. Michael Taylor, Community, Anarchy and Liberty (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982) pp. 25–30. I am grateful to Tim Bickerstaffe for making me aware of the Credit Union movement, and for a discussion of Elias’s social theory that makes me more confident about the ‘emotion’ point below. For contractual solidarity, see ch. 7 of The Division of Labour in Society (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1984). This at any rate is what I infer from Jung Chang’s moving account of her parents’ careers as communist officials before the Cultural Revolution, and their fate during it. See Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (Glasgow, Flamingo, 1993) esp. Ch. 9 ‘Living with an Incorruptible Man’. Jerry Cohen recognizes the force of this need in an important passage which reads: ‘I claim, then, that there is a human need to which Marxist observation is commonly blind, one different from and as deep as the need to cultivate one’s talents. It is the need to be able to say not what I can do but who I am, satisfaction of which has historically been found in identification with others in a shared culture based on nationality, or race, or religion, or some slice or amalgam thereof’. ‘Reconsidering Historical Materialism’, reprinted in History, Labour and Freedom (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988) p. 140. Perhaps it should be emphasized that while the state of belonging is a desirable one, given that it satisfies the putative need for identification of the self, belonging as a political value depends entirely on the value of that to which one belongs: there is no merit in belonging to a community of bigots, for example. This is another reason to doubt that the aim of creating belongingness could be an independent socialist value. In so far as community rests on common identity, the difficulty of deliberately creating such an identity will be one of the difficulties involved in deliberately creating a community. Cf. ‘on the whole, one’s identity must be
52
15.
16.
17. 18.
19. 20.
21.
22.
23.
Alan Carling experienced as not a matter for choice – and that is [a] reason why people do not set themselves the project of achieving an identity’. Ibid. p. 139. Bill Jordan has spoken recently of the ‘down side’ of informal community in terms of ‘the inequalities of power that characterise such relations, and the various blood-and-guts traditions that supply its norms (religion, racism, patriarchy and folk dancing)’. ‘New Labour, New Community?’, Imprints 3/2, Winter 1998–99, 113–31, 120. The point is well taken, and part of the point is that community as commonly defined may well conflict with (every!) other socialist value: autonomy and democracy and equality. Another way of making the point is to say that the ultimate motive for the co-operative behaviour is egoistic, in terms of the useful distinction between ultimate and instrumental motivations introduced by Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson in Unto Others (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1998) pp. 217–22. Cohen, ‘Back to Socialist Basics’ (note 2) pp. 9, 11. Should it be ‘so doing’ in the first quotation? Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme in Marx-Engels Werke (Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1976) Vol. 19, p. 21. Note also how the primeval socialist slogan is prefaced by the assumption that ‘labour has become not only a means of life but itself life’s prime want’. This suggests strongly that ‘from each according to ability’ expresses an outcome which originates in the producer’s need to labour, not in the consumer’s need for labour service. Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985) p. 9. Richard Titmuss, The Gift Relationship (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1970), pp. 238–9. Despite the magnificence of the prose, I am tempted to ask: if there are none of these things, what does keep the Transfusion Service ticking over? The answer must be, I think, a trust that reciprocation will be forthcoming, but Titmuss’s point is that nothing lies behind the trust in the role of guarantor: it is, so to speak, trust sui generis. There is a fleeting passage in ‘Back to Socialist Basics’ (note 2) in which Jerry Cohen expresses an idea closer to reciprocity-as-social norm: ‘The marketeer is willing to serve, but only in order to be served. He does not desire the conjunction (serve-and-be-served) as such, for he would not serve if doing so were not a means to get service. The difference is expressed in the lack of fine tuning that attends non-market motivation. Contrast taking turns in a loose way with respect to who buys the drinks with keeping a record of who has paid what for them. The former procedure is in line with the community, the latter with the market’ (p. 10). But this distinction is not what is implied by the more elaborate definitions elsewhere in the text. An implication of this line of thought left unpursued here is that while the market may be neutral with respect to the achievement of some socialist aims, it is certainly opposed to community, and to this extent ‘market socialism’ is a contradiction in terms. I did not include democracy in the headline list of values in ‘Analytical and Essential Marxism’, mainly because that list was intended to be descriptive of a historical tradition, and it must be recorded with a due sense of its human cost that democracy has not figured as it should in the Marxist tradition. Here I am making democracy a core value: non-democratic socialism
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24.
25.
26.
27.
28. 29.
30. 31.
is a contradiction in terms. John Roemer takes the same position in A Future for Socialism (note 7) p. 11. It is not only rights, but also procedural justice (that is, impartiality) which may demand that one not take part in some decisions whose outcome affects one’s welfare. This is a general requirement of fairness in competitive allocations among individuals for jobs, awards, prizes and so on. The other way historically in which the boundary problem has been solved is to posit the prior existence of nations, and give each nation the right of self-determination. The problem is that it is not as hard to define nations historically as nationalists tend to think, so that a nation can be elaborated corresponding to each potential constituency, with the Ulster paradox reappearing in the question – which nation should have self-determination? This is the case with the celebrated (or notorious) British and Irish Communist Organization, which concluded on the basis of an application to the Northern Ireland situation of Stalin’s definition of a nation that the Northern Protestants are a national entity, of which Unionism is the legitimate selfdetermined expression. J. Hornsby, ‘Free and Equal Speech’, Imprints 1/2, 1996, 59–76. Hornsby uses the Austinian distinction between locution and illocution to argue that illocution (the act of doing things in speaking – such as communication – beyond the mere production of meaningful sentences) depends upon conditions of reciprocity among speakers and hearers that may be violated by various social barriers or inequalities. This raises the possibility of a critique of speech acts which goes beyond the conventional assertion of negative liberty (‘free speech’) to include a critique of the social conditions of discourse: ‘Caring about free speech . . . is a matter of caring about benefits which accrue from people’s capacities to do things with words, where such capacities include illocutionary, communicative things. A defence of freedom of speech does not merely uphold individual’s freedom as such, but alludes to the potential benefits to one and all of situations in which speech is generally free’ (p. 73). The connection to other socialist values is clear: free and equal speech is to free speech somewhat as autonomy is to negative liberty, and communicative reciprocity is akin to – it may even be an aspect of – communal reciprocity. What is equalized by these proposals is not intra-unit power itself, but equal access to intra-unit power. It is the right to participate that is guaranteed; what one makes of that participation is in the hands of the individual. This accords with the treatment below of equality in relation to autonomy, and Roemer’s view in A Future for Socialism (note 2) p. 11. See A. Sen, ‘Equality of what?’, in S. McMurrin (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values: Vol. 1 (Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1980). This point is reinforced by the conclusions reached above regarding community. If community is defined in terms of a social norm that gives due weight to the claims of self and others, then what makes community valuable is that the relative weights are justly assigned. That is, community is desirable as a goal only in so far as it reflects social justice. J. Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice and Equality of Opportunity (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1996; 1998). See ‘Analytical and Essential Marxism’ (note 2) pp. 777–8.
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32. Cf. Equality ‘irrespective of work, effort or contribution to the community is not a socialist dream but other people’s nightmare of socialism’. Gordon Brown, ‘Why Labour is Still Loyal to the Poor’, The Guardian, 2 Aug. 1997, cited in Jordan (note 15). 33. See Roemer (note 30) ch. 5. 34. It is only part of what it means since allocation according to need might involve compensation for past deficits in external resources (e.g. past access to education) as well as current deficits of internal resources. 35. I do not pursue here the question whether efficiency is a further core value, or whether it is an expression of the problem of jointly optimising the existing four values. The latter would be true for example if the only reason to be concerned at the lower aggregate capability in brain surgery would be the effect on the autonomy of the patients denied treatment as a result of the egalitarian surgeon-training policy. The trade-off presented in the text as a trade-off between justice and efficiency would then be represented more accurately as a trade-off between equality and autonomy. 36. Equality of Opportunity (note 30) pp. 5–6. 37. Ibid. ch. 4. 38. See A Future for Socialism (note 7) passim. 39. The analogy with skills and earned income is not perfect, since investment income presumably depends on the quality of the investment decisions (and also luck), and not just the amount of effort devoted to the process (e.g., the amount of time spent reading The Financial Times). Having said this, it may be that the analogy is perfect after all, because (a) there is no luck in the deterministic world of Roemerian social theory and (b) equal opportunity demands the equalization of investment skills levels.
3 The Ethical Marxism of Erich Fromm Lawrence Wilde
Only if man masters society and subordinates the economic machine to the purposes of human happiness, and only if he actively participates in the social process, can he overcome what now drives him into despair – his aloneness and his feeling of powerlessness (Erich Fromm, 1941).1 The coincidence of the centenary of the birth of Erich Fromm (1900–1980) and the dawn of a new century provides a timely opportunity to reassess his largely neglected contribution to socialist theory. Fromm is one of the most widely read theorists associated with the Marxist tradition, but for the most part this popularity rests on the attraction which books like The Art of Loving hold for those in search of individual paths to enlightenment in a rather unloving world.2 Fromm was very concerned by the possibility that his work could be read solely for individual therapy, with the socialism pushed to one side. Shortly before the publication of his final book, To Have Or to Be? (1976), he withdrew a section on ‘Steps Towards Being’ for fear that it might encourage individualistic responses to conditions which require structural transformation.3 Indeed he condemned many of the books which purport to show the way to well-being as harmful by their fraudulence, ‘exploiting the new market that caters to people’s wish to escape their malaise’.4 Metaphorically, the intention here is to relocate Fromm from the burgeoning ‘Spiritual Paths’ shelves of the radical bookshop to the dusty and diminishing space reserved for ‘Socialist Theory’. I will argue that in developing the ethical and psychological implications of Marx’s theory of alienation and applying it to the conditions of his day, he made an immensely valuable yet underestimated contribution to socialist theory. Its ethical force has immense resonance today, in the era of 55
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‘super-capitalism’ which he anticipated back in the 1950s.5 Although his interventions on aspects of social and political life covered several areas, I will focus solely on his discussions of working life as an example of how socialist humanistic ethics can assume a practical relevance in a politics of everyday life. Fromm developed a fusion of Freudian psychology and Marx’s social theory in Frankfurt in the late 1920s and early 1930s.6 He sought to fill a lacuna in socialist theory by analysing how and why the consciousness of social groups developed in the way that it did. At the outset of his work he was convinced that socialist theory had concentrated on the economics and politics of social transformation at the expense of understanding how people responded psychologically to social change. From his own autobiographical account we gather that the carnage of the First World War and the bellicose mentality it generated had a profound effect in urging him towards ways of understanding the madness that had been unleashed.7 He trained in Freudian psychoanalysis in Munich and Berlin in 1928 and 1929 and his early work shows him struggling to link a Marxian conviction in the primacy of socioeconomic conditioning with Freudian libido theory based on biologically grounded instincts.8 On his appointment as a social psychologist at the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt School in 1930, Fromm commenced work on an empirical study of the character-types of working-class people. The project had clear links with Marx’s interest in what the working class thought about their place in the world. Towards the end of his life Marx had put together a detailed questionnaire to gather evidence from the working class about a range of issues concerning their working and living conditions, from wage levels and trade union activity to what their children were taught in school.9 Fromm’s study involved a detailed questionnaire, distributed to over 3000 workers in Germany during 1929–31, the period when millions were thrown out of work. The analysis of the 1100 responses concluded that 20 per cent of respondents were ‘authoritarian’ in nature and that only 15 per cent were passionate supporters of left-wing views.10 The majority were therefore more passive than communists or socialists liked to think, and were quite likely to acquiesce to an authoritarian ‘solution’ to social ills. The work was a pioneering endeavour to fuse Marxist class analysis and psychological character analysis, as well as a chilling indication that the prospects for resisting the rise of German fascism were unfavourable.11 The Nazi seizure of power forced Fromm and his fellow members of
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the Frankfurt School into exile, first in Geneva and then New York, and it was here that he made a decisive break with Freud’s theory of instincts, along with other founders of the ‘culturalist’ school of psychoanalysis, Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan. The break with Freud was not acceptable to his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, and Fromm departed in 1938. Although Marcuse later attacked Fromm as a ‘neo-Freudian revisionist’,12 John Schaar is closer to the mark when he states that Fromm was a revisionist of Freud much as the Prince of Darkness was a revisionist of the Prince of Light.13 However, even though Fromm proceeded to develop his concept of social character based on cultural conditioning rather than biological determination, his character types retain a similarity to Freud’s, and he always maintained a respect for the breath and bravery of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. But Fromm’s most profound and enduring debt was to Marx. Early in his career he describes Marx as ‘the greatest sociologist of all’,14 but his admiration was deepened on encountering the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, published for the first time in 1932. According to Fromm, it was Marx’s ‘interactionist’ account of human development which was the decisive influence on his development of the concept of social character in the course of the 1930s.15 Not only did Fromm share Marx’s rich philosophical humanism, but he did much to publicize this ‘alternative Marx’ by having the English translation published in the United States in 1961 and editing a popular collection of papers in the socialist humanist tradition.16
Social character and human essence Fromm’s development of a distinctive social psychology and a humanistic ethics culminated in The Fear of Freedom (1941) and Man For Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (1947). In the appendix to The Fear of Freedom he outlines his key concept of social character, that part of the character structure of individuals which is common to most members of a particular social group, developed in response to their conditions of life, ‘[t]he social character comprises only a selection of traits, the essential nucleus of the character structure of most members of a group which has developed as the result of the basic experiences and mode of life common to that group’.17 Social character is shaped by the dynamic adaptation of needs to social reality, and, in its turn, social character conditions the thinking, feeling, and acting of individuals. In a later formulation, Fromm argues that the concept of social character helps to
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IDEAS AND IDEALS
SOCIAL CHARACTER
ECONOMIC BASIS Figure 3.1 Fromm’s notion of social character as intermediate between material basis and ideas
explain the link between the material basis of society and the ideological superstructure. It is the ‘intermediary’ between the socioeconomic structure and the ideas and ideals prevalent in society.18 Setting down the position of social character in terms of causal flows runs the risk of implying deterministic relationships, but Fromm is careful to stress the dynamism of human adaptation and our capacity to change the world. In later writings he emphasizes the complex interaction between human nature and the nature of the external conditions, stating that humanity is not a ‘blank sheet of paper on which culture can write its text’.19 So, despite his analysis of the various ways in which humanity has turned away from real freedom in the modern era, he maintains that the ideal of positive freedom endures and is manifested in the dignity and decency of many individuals.20 The Fear of Freedom is concerned with the psychological effects of the socio-economic changes of modernity on various social classes from the time of the Reformation to the mid-twentieth century. On the one hand, modernity is characterized by the genuine advance of freedom from the ‘political, economic and spiritual shackles that have bound men’,21 but on the other hand the dissolution of old securities is so frightening that people in different social classes have grouped together behind a variety of belief systems and movements which bind them to new forms of domination and submission. So, in the course of modern history, the authority of the Church is replaced by the authority of the State, which is in turn replaced by the authority of conscience, and finally, in the twentieth century, the authority of conscience is replaced by the ‘anonymous authority of common sense and public opinion as instruments of conformity’.22
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Writing at a time when fascism was still in the ascendant, Fromm is naturally concerned with the development of the authoritarian character in the middle classes, from the point of view of both those who lead and those who follow.23 However, the final chapter is devoted to freedom and democracy, and here Fromm is chiefly concerned with the ‘illusion of individuality’, pointing to the pressures in modern society which discourage critical thinking, spontaneity and authenticity. Fromm lambasts such practices as the suppression of the emotions, rote learning in education, mass advertising, and the trivialisation of news presentation. In general he bemoans the increasing ‘loss of self’ which increases the need to conform and is typified by a profound feeling of powerlessness as modern ‘man’ gazes towards approaching catastrophes ‘as though he were paralysed’.24 These themes are now widely associated with the Frankfurt School theorists, but it was Fromm’s book which first brought them to the attention of a wide readership. In sharp contrast to his erstwhile colleagues, Fromm’s warnings about the illusions of modern freedom are tempered with words of hope. This takes the form of a commitment to the real possibility of self-realization, the development of the potential present in everybody but expressed all too rarely. Positive freedom is defined as ‘the spontaneous activity of the total, integrated personality’,25 and, furthermore, it is expressed only through solidarity with others.26 While democracy is a prerequisite for development towards this positive freedom, it must be extended from the political to the economic sphere, and the manipulation of people must be replaced by co-operation.27 The historical social psychology presented in The Fear of Freedom is really a brilliant elaboration of Marx’s work on alienation and commodity fetishism, disclosing the mechanisms through which the ‘freedom’ of developed capitalist society leaves people isolated and dominated by forces beyond their control. At this stage Fromm is more intent on posting warnings than identifying potential progressive movements, but in the historical circumstances this is understandable. Marcuse’s judgement that Fromm offers no more than the ‘power of positive thinking’ in response to the curtailment of freedom in our society is somewhat harsh.28 In fact, Fromm fully accepts Marx’s injunction to change the world, and from the publication of The Sane Society in 1956 his work moves increasingly towards an engagement with social and political action which might contribute to a radical transformation of values. In Man For Himself Fromm boldly sets out to provide an ‘objectively valid’ humanistic ethics.29 In the process he elucidates a view of human
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essence and also elaborates in some detail the character-types or ‘orientations’ which are left vague in the previous work. Fromm spurns the ‘rules and principles’ approach which has dominated the philosophical treatment of ethics for two centuries and instead propounds what might be termed a ‘character ethics’.30 Alisdair MacIntyre has argued persuasively that the Enlightenment attempt to justify morality was bound to fail because it jettisoned the central element on which all moral thought from Aristotle up to that time had been based, namely, the idea of a human nature and a human telos.31 The abandonment of the idea of an essential human nature striving towards a telos leaves a vacuum, for moral precepts cannot be derived from a view of untutored human nature. More often than not, Enlightenment ethics assumes that to be moral is to overcome human nature, and what is natural to humanity is often seen as ‘an enemy within’, something to be suppressed if good is to be achieved. Fromm explicitly criticizes not just Luther and Calvin for promoting this perspective but also Kant, for whom the pursuit of happiness was not an ethical consideration.32 Ultimately, for Fromm, a humanistic ethic requires that we love our selves, in a non-egotistical sense, in contrast to most modern ethical philosophy which regards self-love as a sin or a failing. His conception of human essence is the premise on which he bases his commitment to value ourselves as co-operative, creative beings. He commends Aristotle’s espousal of the goal of eudaemonia or happiness based on the full development of our human potential, and also on Spinoza’s commitment to freedom and the productive use of powers as the only criteria of value.33 Fromm identifies a similarity between Spinoza and Marx in their conceptions of human essence, citing the passage in Capital in which Marx derides Bentham’s utilitarianism. Marx argues that to talk about what is good for man requires a view of human nature in general, in the same way that to talk about what is good for a dog requires a knowledge of dog nature. Marx explicitly distinguishes between human nature in general and human nature as ‘historically modified’.34 In his later work, Fromm comments that Marx had arrived at the most significant definition of the species character of ‘man’ as ‘free, conscious activity’.35 Fromm considered the phenomenon of alienation to be incoherent without a conception of the essence from which we are alienated. Commenting on a passage in Capital in which Marx depicts the worker becoming distorted into a ‘fragment of a man’, Fromm comments that Marx must have had a concept of human nature from which man could be ‘crippled’.36 For Fromm, humanistic ethics is based on the principle that ‘good’ is
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what is good for man and ‘evil’ is what is detrimental to man, and the sole criterion of ethical value is man’s welfare.37 ‘Good’ is regarded as the affirmation of life through the unfolding of man’s powers and ‘virtue’ as responsibility to our own existence, whereas ‘evil’ is the crippling of our power and vice is irresponsibility toward oneself.38 In the discussion of social character in Man For Himself Fromm contrasts productive and non-productive orientations.39 The non-productive orientations are presented as the receptive, exploitative, hoarding and marketing types, the latter being the most recent development whereby the character is dependent on the requirements of the market.40 Where the non-productive orientations prevail the result is ‘dysfunction and unhappiness’,41 and when this happens on a widespread scale it gives rise to a ‘socially patterned defect’.42 It is important to note that as the concept of social character is a dynamic one; the various nonproductive sub-orientations are not mutually exclusive, and nor are productive and non-productive orientations. Rather it is a question of which orientations predominate and why. In his account of the productive orientation he effectively maps out a modern equivalent of what the Ancient Greek philosophers referred to as the virtues.43 Productiveness involves the development of our human powers of rationality and love while avoiding exercising power as domination over others. Through productiveness we resolve the paradox of human existence by simultaneously expressing our oneness with others and our uniqueness.44 Later, in To Have or To Be?, he lists the qualities of the character structure of the ‘new man’, emphasizing the need to take full responsibility for our lives, to reduce greed and hate, and to exercise our imagination in the struggle to remove intolerable circumstances.45 Fromm distinguishes between ‘universal’ and ‘socially immanent’ ethics. He notes that universal principles such as ‘thou shalt not kill’ or ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ have been amazingly similar in all cultures, but there are also principles which are specific to particular cultures and even social classes within cultures whose virtues need to be adhered to if the social entity is to survive.46 Ultimately, there will remain a conflict between the two different types of ethics ‘as long as humanity has not succeeded in building a community in which the interest of “society” has become identical with that of its members’. The contradiction between absolute and immanent principles will tend to disappear only if society becomes progressively free and human.47 This formulation is almost identical to a passage by Marx in The Holy Family in which he declares that ‘private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity’.48 Fromm’s account of the major moral
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problem of the age – ‘man’s indifference to himself’ – is, in effect, an ethico-psychological analysis of what commodity fetishism does to human relations and mental health. He argues that the pursuit of money, prestige and power prevents us from recognising the interests of our real self, and he bemoans the fact that we bow down to the ‘anonymous power of the market’ and ‘of the machine whose servants we have become’.49 Boldly, he claims objective validity for his ethics on the grounds that living is an art and that like all arts there are objective norms against which we make judgements. Humanistic ethics, he claims, is the applied science of the art of living based on the theoretical ‘science of man’.50 However provisional the truths of this science, Fromm argues that it is possible to use the tools of psychological and other research to reach an understanding of human nature. In giving his account of the virtuous character and distinguishing it from non-productive character types, Fromm’s ethics makes explicit what Marx hinted at in his contrast between the self-realized person and the alienated one. It seems to me that more than any other Marxist Fromm has developed a humanistic ethics which builds faithfully on the ethical foundations of Marx’s thought, even though Marx determinedly shunned the language of moralism.51 In the long introductory essay to Marx’s Concept of Man Fromm makes clear his enthusiasm for the normative implication of the alienation thesis: For Marx, as for Hegel, the concept of alienation is based on the distinction between existence and essence, on the fact that man’s existence is alienated from his essence, that in reality he is not what he potentially is, or, to put it differently, that he is not what he ought to be, and that he ought to be that which he could be.52 Throughout his work, Fromm emphasizes that in common with Marx he is committed to the idea that humans ought to live directly for themselves and for others, rather than for money, status, nation, God, or anything alien and alienating. He summarizes Marx’s conception of socialism as the destruction of the idols.53 He endorses the passage from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in which he laments that in capitalist ideology ‘the less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life’.54 Marx wrote of an alienation which was accompanied by deep poverty, but Fromm recognizes an ‘affluent alienation’ which can be equally dehumanising.55 His driving concern is with how this alienation was manifested in social character, the extent to which it prevailed, and the
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possibility of its supersession through the creation of a libertarian socialist society. Although Fromm endorses Marx’s idea of human essence, he puts a psychological spin on it. Marx emphasized our capacity for premeditated and co-operative production, and production becomes his key concept. Fromm points to the dynamic development of the relationship between essence and existence, between human nature in general and human nature as historically modified, in terms of our constant striving to extend our faculties. For Fromm, the human essence is to be found in the contradiction of being in nature and at the same time transcending nature through our awareness of ourselves, others, and time. Striving to overcome this contradiction, humans may regress, by doing away with the specifically human qualities of reason and love and becoming slaves, slave-drivers, or automata, or they may progress towards a new unity with fellow humanity and nature by creating a world in which human potential can be freely developed.56 To Have or To Be? brings together many of the themes developed in previous works. Rejecting the equation of technology and consumption with progress and freedom, he argues that unlimited production, absolute freedom and unrestricted happiness amount to a new religion of Progress which he dubs ‘The Great Promise’. This is based on the psychological premises that radical hedonism and egotism will lead to harmony and peace.57 The promise, of course, can never be met, for it is premised on not delivering general satisfaction but encouraging acquisitiveness, and the individual can never be satisfied because, as Fromm says, ‘there is no end to my wishes’.58 Indeed the logic of accumulation also encourages a constant fear of losing what we have gained.59 Fromm’s analysis of the ‘having mode’ reads very much like a socio-psychological extension of Marx’s commodity fetishism; at one point he claims that it ‘transforms everybody and everything into something dead and subject to another’s power’.60 For Marx, alienation in the accumulation process operates at the very basis of social life, and Fromm is concerned to show how thoroughly this is transmitted in the practices of daily life. There is a tendency for the will of individuals to be broken by ‘a complicated process of indoctrination, rewards, punishments, and fitting ideology’, but in such a way that most people remain convinced that they are following their own will.61 The pressures to conform and compete are increasingly hard to resist. It is not simply the case that greed and envy are so strong because of their inherent intensity, argues Fromm, but because of the way they are enmeshed in our social relations, producing an urgency to be ‘a wolf with the
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wolves’.62 Fromm is concerned with the impact of an ultra-competitive social structure on the psyche of individuals, and, on the basis of his view of human nature, contrasts it with an image of an authentic life, the ‘being mode’. Although he accepts that the having mode is socially dominant, he argues that only a small minority are governed entirely by it. There are still aspects of most people’s lives in which they are genuinely touched by non-instrumental feelings for their fellow human beings. Fromm’s socio-political contributions are designed to explore how we might maximize our productive potential to move us closer to a society in which the being mode prevails. Although his former collaborator Michael Maccoby considers that Fromm’s inclination towards messianism diverts us from developing feasible strategies to make the world a better place,63 there is a great deal of evidence in Fromm’s work to resist that conclusion. The remaining part of this chapter will outline his chief socio-political concerns, in particular his interest in the politics of the world of work.
What sort of politics? Fromm was no idle dreamer and quotes the betting odds on the prospects of social ‘salvation’ at about fifty to one, adding that no reasonable person would stake their fortune on it.64 But a slight chance, he argues, must be translated into a ‘real possibility’ when it is a matter of life or death. This requires political intervention, for, as Fromm admits, it is not possible to construct a submarine by reading Jules Verne, or a humanist society by reading the prophets.65 In many respects his mature political perspectives are similar to many New Left radicals of the 1960s and 1970s – the demand for radical democracy,66 resolute opposition to bureaucracy,67 support for movements focusing on ecology and consumer awareness,68 enthusiasm for feminism, which he first advocated in the early 1930s,69 economic redistribution in favour of the third world,70 and unilateral nuclear disarmament.71 Before moving on to consider his comments on the organisation of work, let us first look at the general principles which underpin his politics of an ethical Marxism. Perhaps the most important principle which permeates Fromm’s politics is that a radical change of values must precede and develop with radical economic and political change. Fromm appeals for a ‘humanistic religiosity’. He refers not to theistic religion with dogma and institutions but to a spirit of ‘devotion’ which can contribute to the
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‘necessary energy to move men and women to accomplish drastic social change’.72 He insists that our actions today must anticipate a more ethical world, so that ‘we can experience the future as if it were the here and now’.73 For Fromm, social democracy and communism had turned socialism into a purely economic concept, placing the emphasis on efficient production and improved levels of consumption. This limited perspective is so far removed from the vision of a non-alienated society that Fromm is moved to assert that ‘even the words socialism and communism are compromised’.74 Fromm considers that in order for people to develop a consciousness which could challenge the economic logic which governs our lives we need to engage in the utopian practice of portraying alternatives. He complains that earlier socialists, including Marx and Lenin, refused to be drawn into concrete plans for a socialist society. In the absence of such concrete goals, compromise and accommodation can have a deadening effect. Fromm argues for a social science that deals with the future, an array of ‘designs, models, studies and experiments that begin to bridge the gap between what is necessary and what is possible’.75 He argues that on purely economic grounds ‘a new ethic, a new attitude towards nature, human solidarity and cooperation’ is necessary if the Western world is not to be wiped out.76 Fromm was willing to seize on ideas which could attract support without presupposing the wholesale transformation of the capitalist system. His comments on the world of work are particularly interesting because they bring in many of his other concerns such as the demand for the radical extension of democracy, the appeal for sane consumption, and the problem of distorted communication. Work is of central significance for Fromm, as it was for Marx. It is our unique creative ability which distinguishes us from other animals, and our finest products and cultivations are expressions of ‘the creative transformation of nature by man’s reason and skill’.77 Furthermore, Fromm insists that the desire to be active, creative and co-operative is ‘inherent and deeply rooted’.78 However, the golden age of medieval craftsmanship has long departed, and Fromm views the modern work experience as stultifying and inimical to the development of the productive character.79 For the manual worker, de-skilling has destroyed interest in the process of work, engendering a ‘socially patterned syndrome of pathology’ manifested in apathy, boredom, lack of joy and a vague feeling that life is meaningless.80 The majority of workers suffer from the dictatorial authority structures of major corporations, in which managerial elites display virtually unlimited power. It is, according to Fromm, the very opposite of the democratic process, a situation of
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‘power without control by those submitted to it’.81 In this situation managements create their own organizational culture and rewards accrue to those who enthuse about it, rather than to those most receptive to the needs of the workers. ‘Only in exceptional cases’, he writes, ‘is success predominantly the result of skill and of certain other human qualities like honesty, decency, and integrity’.82 In addition to direct managerial pressure, the insecurity of the labour market means that those in work live in fear of offending management or feel obliged to adjust their behaviour to conform to the organizational culture. Those who want to move into new occupations in mid-life have little opportunity to do so and become ‘trapped’ for decades in work which holds no interest for them. What is to be done? Fromm is quite clear that these problems would not be adequately resolved before the realization of the final goal of socialism, democratic control of all economic activities, free cooperation of all citizens and the reduction of central state activity to a minimum.83 But he is also well aware of the need to present ‘intermediate’ socialist goals which could be pursued meaningfully by broad sections of working people. These intermediate goals concerning the world of work, many of which he articulated as early as the mid-1950s, deserve closer examination. The idea of a Guaranteed Income for all is one of the ideas supported by Fromm in the 1950s, and one which has resurfaced in a variety of schemes in recent years.84 Fromm sees it as a means to removing one of the greatest limitations on human freedom, ‘the threat of starvation against all who were unwilling to accept the conditions of work and social existence that were imposed upon them’.85 It is important to note that for Fromm the implementation of any such scheme needs to be matched with greatly diminished working hours for all and measures to discourage socially damaging consumption. He talks of a move from ‘maximal’ consumption to ‘optimal’ consumption, without which those on the minimum basic income would feel frustrated and worthless.86 Ideally, the Guaranteed Income would be a step towards liberating people from the domination of the world of work so that they would have the time to confront the critical questions about the direction in which society was travelling and the values it embodied.87 One of the merits of Fromm’s suggestion is that it exposes the hollowness of the liberal claim that the labour contract is a ‘free’ exchange and indeed challenges the link between private property and freedom which tends to be glossed over in modern liberal theory. Another approach which Fromm considers significant is the work on
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human relations management pioneered by Elton Mayo in the late 1940s. In his study of the various experiments in management conducted at the Chicago Hawthorn Works of the Western Electric Company, Mayo demonstrates that the output of workers increased considerably not primarily because their conditions were improved but because they were involved in the decisions to set the conditions of work. Participation in decision making not only improved their job satisfaction but also improved productivity.88 Although it is possible to be sceptical about human relations management on the grounds that it is merely another device to raise productivity, the demand for greater participation in decision making poses a direct threat to authoritarian management systems. Evidence of the greater efficiency of participatory schemes also challenges the commonly held management assumption that workers will perform better only when harassed and pressured. In his socialist manifesto he demands workers’ participation in the management of big corporations and a greater influence for democratic trade unions, particularly on issues surrounding working conditions.89 Ultimately, Fromm wants to see drastic curbs on the right of stockholders and the management of big enterprises to determine their production solely on the basis of profit and expansion,90 but he sees increased workers’ participation as a step towards challenging the omnipotence of corporate management. Where it can be shown that autocratic management is inefficient and damaging, the possibility of raising more consensual alternatives is opened.91 If democracy is now widely seen to be not simply the least dangerous but also the most efficient form of political decision-making, why should it not be similarly perceived in the economic sphere? Fromm’s observations on the world of work were made largely before the end of the postwar boom and the return of mass unemployment. However, in The Sane Society he did anticipate an era of ‘super capitalism’ based on performance related pay and other forms of individualised incentives.92 This has developed with the intensification of competition not just between firms but within organizations, accompanied by ruthless short-termism and an oppressive jargon of the sort that Fromm deplored. Interestingly, the demands in his socialist manifesto for workers’ participation and stronger trade unions are followed immediately by an entreaty to support all attempts to restrict ‘hypnoid suggestion in commercial and political propaganda’.93 He is even more emphatic on the need to prohibit such ‘brainwashing’ in To Have or To Be?, describing it as a serious danger to mental health.94 In the world of work today workers are subjected to a whole new
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lexicon of managerial ‘buzz words’ which set the culture to which they must conform even though there is widespread awareness that this rhetoric is twaddle. However, as Fromm points out, propaganda of this sort is never wholly successful, for people continue to be aware of the numerous occasions in when they are lied to, cheated, or treated with contempt.95 Despite the assault on labour and the hubris of modern management, progress has been made in combating sexism and racism in work as well as exposing the managerial bullies. Fromm provides ethical criteria for supporting these struggles and for rejecting the fundamental elements of inter-personal relationships in the having mode – competition, antagonism, and fear.96 In recent years the campaigns in favour of workers’ participation and consultation, reduced working hours, and more respectful working practices challenge the ‘survival of the fittest’ ideology of late capitalism. The nature of trades unions and the focus of their work has altered along the lines Fromm hoped for,97 and their development contributes to a broader movement of reregulatory political economy which will play a vital role in challenging global corporate power in the coming century.
Conclusion Marx once commented that ‘correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality’.98 He anticipated a world in which the producers, pursuing their class interests, would recognize their exploitation and free themselves from it, in the process freeing humanity at large to realize its full potential in a global, ethical community. Fromm was among those who recognized that the revolutionary class consciousness which Marx had hoped for had not materialized, and that the question of consciousness had to be addressed directly for emancipatory socialist politics to succeed. Fromm regrets Marx’s underestimation of the complexity of human passions and his neglect of ‘the moral factor in man’.99 However understandable it may have been for Marx to eschew moral argument in favour of scientific analysis, there can surely be no justification for such neglect today. Fromm’s work has gone some way to filling this lacuna. With great care he explicates the ethical underpinnings of Marx’s social theory, extends it to analyse the affluent alienation of the late twentieth century, and searches for new ways of contesting it. Speaking in 1962, long before ‘globalization’ became fashionable in social science discourse, Fromm declared that the emergence of the ‘one world’ was not only inevitable but probably the most revolutionary
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event in the history of mankind. The question, he says, is whether that one world will be a liveable world or a world battlefield.100 Since his death in 1980 the globalization of capitalism has developed apace and the bombs continue to whistle down. But a politics of new social movements has developed throughout the world and has had a not inconsiderable impact in raising awareness of global inequalities and global interdependence. The struggles against racism, sexism, environmental degradation and third world debt pose anew those big questions about the purpose and direction of social life to which Fromm dedicated his life. He was right to recognize that the transformation of values was a prerequisite for the achievement of human freedom and solidarity, and that only through active engagement at every level of public life can this be achieved. The hope that the one world might indeed become liveable in the coming century is to be found in the ongoing work which has produced a number of global summits, schemes for developing democratic global governance, demands for global economic reregulation and redistribution, as well as in the myriad struggles which oppose oppression in everyday life and assert instead the paramountcy of human dignity.
Notes 1. Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (London, Routledge, 1997) p. 238. This is the title adopted for publication in Britain in 1942. The original title in the United States was Escape From Freedom. 2. Fromm’s The Art of Loving sold one and a half million English language copies between 1956 and 1970 and was translated into 28 other languages – see Rainer Funk, Erich Fromm: The Courage to be Human (New York, Continuum, 1982) p. 7. 3. The excised section has since been published as The Art of Being (London, Constable, 1993) – see the foreword by Rainer Funk, p. vii. 4. Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be? (London, Abacus, 1993) p. 169. 5. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (London, Routledge, 1991) pp. 240–46. 6. On the development of Fromm’s career see Rainer Funk, Erich Fromm (note 2) Introduction, or, for a brief biographical sketch of his early life, Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge, Polity, 1994) pp. 52–60. 7. Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter With Marx and Freud (New York, Trident Press, 1962) ch. 1. 8. For example, ‘The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology: Notes on Psychoanalysis and Historical Materialism’ (1932), in Erich Fromm, The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970) ch. 7, particularly pp. 116–17; also ‘Politics and Psychoanalysis’ (1931), in Stephen Bronner and Douglas Kellner (eds), Critical Theory and Society: A Reader (New York and London, Routledge, 1989) ch. 16.
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9. Hilde Weiss, ‘Karl Marx’s Enquête Ouvrière’, in Tom Bottomore (ed.), Karl Marx (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973), originally published in the Frankfurt School’s journal in 1936; Weiss was a co-worker on Fromm’s study of the German working class. 10. Erich Fromm, The Working Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study (Leamington Spa, Berg, 1984) p. 228. 11. For an excellent discussion of the Weimar workers’ project see José Brunner, ‘Looking Into the Hearts of the Workers, or: How Erich Fromm Turned Critical Theory into Empirical Research’, Political Psychology 15/4, 1994. 12. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (London, Routledge, 1998 [originally 1955]) Epilogue. 13. John H. Schaar, Escape From Authority: The Perspectives of Erich Fromm (Evanston, NY and London, Harper Torchbooks, 1964) p. 8. 14. Erich Fromm, ‘Psychoanalysis and Sociology’ (1929), in Bronner and Kellner (note 8) p. 39. 15. Fromm, ‘Marx’s Contribution to the Knowledge of Man’, in The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (note 8) ch. 3. In this paper, delivered in Paris at the time of the street-fighting in May 1968, he presents Marx as a forerunner of Freud. 16. Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York, Continuum, 1992), including a translation of the Manuscripts by Tom Bottomore; Erich Fromm (ed.), Socialist Humanism (New York, Doubleday). 17. Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (note 1) p. 239. 18. I have adapted this diagram from the original one found in Fromm, ‘The Application of Humanist Psychoanalysis to Marx’s Theory’, in Fromm, On Disobedience and Other Essays (New York, Seabury Press, 1981) pp. 29–30. 19. Fromm, Man For Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (New York, Owl Books, 1990) p. 23; he repeats this formula in The Sane Society (note 5) p. 81. 20. Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (note 1) p. 232. 21. Ibid. p. 1. 22. Ibid. p. 218. 23. Fromm extends this study to concentrate on Hitler in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (London, Pimlico, 1997 [originally 1974]) ch. 13. 24. Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (note 1) pp. 220–21. 25. Ibid. p. 222. 26. Ibid. p. 228. 27. Ibid. pp. 234–8. 28. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation (note 12) pp. 262, 266. 29. Fromm, Man For Himself (note 19) pp. 14–20; for an excellent discussion of Fromm’s ethics, see Rainer Funk, Erich Fromm: The Courage to be Human (note 2) ch. 5. 30. See Edmund Pincoffs, ‘Quandary Ethics’, in Stanley Hauerwas and Alisdair MacIntyre (eds), Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy (Notre Dame and London, University of Notre Dame Press, 1983). 31. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn (London: Duckworth, 1995) ch. 5. 32. Fromm, Man For Himself (note 19) pp. 119–23. 33. Fromm, Man for Himself (note 19) pp. 25–7.
The Ethical Marxism of Erich Fromm 71 34. Marx, Capital in C.W. Vol. 35, p. 605n; Fromm cites this passage in Man For Himself (note 19) pp. 27–8n, The Sane Society (note 5) p. 254, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter With Marx and Freud (London, Abacus, 1980) p. 28, and The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (note 8) p. 47. 35. Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanised Technology (London: Harper Colophon, 1970) p. 58. The reference is to Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in C.W. Vol. 3, p. 276. 36. Fromm, ‘The Application of Humanist Psychoanalysis to Marx’s Theory’, in Fromm, On Disobedience and Other Essays (note 18) pp. 38–9. The passage from Capital is in Marx, C.W. 35, p. 639. 37. Fromm, Man For Himself (note 19) p. 13. 38. Ibid. p. 20. 39. Ibid. ch. 3. 40. The discussion of the non-productive orientations is found in ibid. pp. 62–82. 41. Ibid. p. 219. 42. Ibid. p. 221. 43. Ibid. pp. 82–107. 44. Ibid. pp. 96 –7. 45. Fromm, To Have or To Be? (note 4) pp. 167–8. 46. Ibid. pp. 240–41. 47. Ibid. pp. 243–4. 48. Marx, C.W. Vol. 4, pp. 130–1. 49. Ibid. pp. 19, 245–50. 50. Ibid. p. 18; for his defence of the ‘science of man’, pp. 20–24. 51. I discuss Marx’s conception of human essence, its status in his social theory, and his eschewal of moral discourse in Lawrence Wilde, Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics (London, Macmillan and New York, St Martin’s Press, 1998) chs 1, 2, 3. 52. Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (note 16) p. 47. 53. Ibid. p. 61. 54. Karl Marx, C.W. Vol. 3, p. 309. 55. Erich Fromm, Socialist Humanism (note 16) p. xi; in The Holy Family Marx describes the members of the propertied class as alienated, albeit ‘at ease and strengthened’ in their alienation because they see it as a product of their own power and retain ‘the semblance of human existence’ (C.W. Vol. 4, p. 36). 56. Fromm, On Disobedience and Other Essays (note 18) p. 39. 57. Fromm, To Have or To Be? (note 4) pp. 11–13. 58. Ibid. p. 15. 59. Ibid. p. 111. 60. Ibid. p. 82. 61. Ibid. p. 83. 62. Ibid. p. 194. 63. Michael Maccoby, ‘The Two Voices of Erich Fromm: Prophet and Analyst’, in Society 32/5, 1995. 64. Fromm, To Have or To Be? (note 4) p. 192. 65. Ibid. p. 171. 66. Ibid. pp. 178–9, 189–91; cf. Fromm, Revolution of Hope (note 35) pp. 107–16.
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67. Fromm, To Have or to Be? (note 4) p. 175. 68. Ibid. ch. 9. 69. In an article published in 1934 Fromm condemned the ‘patricentric’ psychic structure and linked ‘matricentrism’ with socialism – see The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (note 8) ch. 7; see also ch. 6 and To Have or To Be? (note 4) pp. 186–9. 70. Fromm, To Have or to Be? (note 4) p. 184. 71. Ibid. pp. 191–2; his big appeal for nuclear disarmament came in May Man Prevail? An Inquiry into the Facts and Fictions of Foreign Policy (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961). 72. Fromm, To Have or To Be? (note 4) pp. 133, 196. 73. Ibid. p. 128. 74. Ibid. p. 157. 75. Ibid. p. 172. 76. Ibid. p. 193. 77. Fromm, The Sane Society (note 5) p. 178. 78. Fromm, To Have or To Be? (note 4) pp. 103–4. 79. Fromm’s discussion of work is criticized at length by John Schaar in Escape From Authority (note 13) pp. 264–83. The potential in developing Fromm’s ideas on work organization for emancipatory theory has been recognized by Hugh Wilmott and David Knights, ‘The Problem of Freedom: Fromm’s Contribution to a Critical Theory of Work Organisation’, Praxis International 2/2, 204–25. 80. Fromm, The Sane Society (note 5) p. 295. 81. Fromm, ‘Let Man Prevail’ (originally 1960) in On Disobedience and Other Essays (note 18) p. 62. 82. Fromm, Man For Himself (note 19) p. 69. 83. Fromm, ‘Humanist Socialism’ in On Disobedience and Other Essays (note 18) pp. 78–9. 84. The idea for an unconditional income for all was first expressed just after the First World War, in books by Bertrand Russell and Dennis Milner. See Philippe Van Parijs (ed.), Arguing for Basic Income (London: Verso, 1992) Introduction. 85. Fromm, ‘The Psychological Aspects of the Guaranteed Income’ (originally 1966) in On Disobedience and Other Essays (note 18) p. 91. 86. Ibid. p. 96. 87. Ibid. p. 93; see also his discussion of the ‘universal subsistence guarantee’, in The Sane Society (note 5) pp. 335–8. 88. Fromm, The Sane Society (note 5) pp. 302–5. 89. Fromm, ‘Humanist Socialism’, in On Disobedience (note 18) p. 89. 90. Fromm, To Have or to Be? (note 4) pp. 173–5. 91. Fromm approvingly quotes Peter Drucker’s Concept of the Corporation ( New York, John Day, 1946) in The Sane Society (note 5) p. 181. Drucker is still warning against the short-sightedness of conventional business management – Management Challenges for the Twenty-First Century (London, Butterworth Heinemann, 1999). 92. Fromm, The Sane Society (note 5) pp. 240–6. 93. Fromm, ‘Humanist Socialism’, in On Disobedience (note 18) p. 89. 94. Fromm, To Have or To Be? (note 4) p. 183.
The Ethical Marxism of Erich Fromm 73 95. Fromm, To Have or To Be? (note 4) p. 101. 96. Ibid. p. 114. 97. In the United States this is reflected in the success of the ‘New Voice’ movement in the AFL-CIO – see Jo-Ann Mort (ed.), Not Your Father’s Union Movement: Inside the AFL-CIO (London, Verso, 1998). 98. C.W. Vol. 4, p. 130. 99. Fromm, The Sane Society (note 4) p. 264. 100. Erich Fromm, ‘A New Humanism as a Condition for the One World’, in Fromm, On Being Human ( New York: Continuum, 1998) pp. 61–2.
4 The Ethical Post-Marxism of Alasdair MacIntyre Kelvin Knight
The end of the twentieth century, and of a millennium, may be an appropriate time at which to ask where Marxism went wrong. The century was that in which Marxism came and went as a world-shaping political and cultural force. Its tragic history is one of zealous hopes and desperate failures, of revolutions and mass suffering, of ideas institutionalized and institutions collapsing. The millennium reminds us that Marxism was the millennial creed of modernity. If a few still cling to its revolutionary hopes, their rivals and friends alike now find it virtually impossible to take such ideas seriously. Where once were Marxists, postmodernists now indict Marxism as an archetypically modern essentializing metanarrative and totalizing discourse. Whatever Marxism might be at the end of the millennium, it is not what was once preached by Engels and Kautsky, Lenin and Stalin, Trotsky and Mao. What remains of Eastern Marxism is merely conservative; what remains of Western Marxism is merely academic. This chapter amplifies the argument of Alasdair MacIntyre that Marxism failed because it never established premises that were sufficiently robust and sufficiently distinct from those of liberal theory to enable it to mount a radical challenge to capitalist practice. The chapter also relates that argument to the argument of others that Marxism now requires an ethics. It argues that, if Marxists are to mount an ethical challenge to capitalism, they must first go back to Marx’s original premises and elaborate them sufficiently to contest those of liberalism.1
Ethical Marxism Since the theoretical and institutional collapse of Marxism-Leninism, a number of Western academics have attempted to recast Marxism in an 74
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ethical form. Their attempts have two, related, warrants in the history of a tradition which, for the most part, set itself against any form of moralizing. One warrant is the previous attempts of some Western Marxists to ‘humanize’ Marxism. The second is the publication and translation, around mid-century, of several previously unknown works by ‘the early Marx’ in which he wrote of the alienation of humankind from our species-essence. These early works, and those earlier Western Marxists, made evident the origins of Marxism in Hegelianism. Several of the more recent ethical Marxist academics have gone further, claiming a considerable influence upon and affinity with Marx of classical Greek philosophy and particularly of the philosophy of Aristotle. Rather than focus upon the influence of Hegel’s historicized teleology, they identify a more naturalistic teleology and, therefore, a more directly and authentically Aristotelian influence than any that might be ascribed to Hegelian mediation alone.2 Carol Gould and Scott Meikle were among the first to contend that Marx’s theories were grounded in an Aristotelian ontology,3 and others have argued about the extent to which those theories should be considered Aristotelian.4 Most recently, Lawrence Wilde has discussed Marx’s Aristotelianism within an overview of humanist Marxism.5 Wilde acknowledges that ‘the politics of working-class interest has not produced a socialist consciousness’, and therefore that Marxism has to ‘suggest reasons why people ought to unite to change the world’.6 The central reason is that class society alienates us from our essential human nature of social creativity. He presents Marx’s ‘commitment to communism’ as ‘an ethical commitment to the creation of the good life’, as a ‘struggle for the reconciliation of existence with essence’ and as ‘an appeal to how we ought to live’, ‘that we ought to be at one with our essence’.7 Wilde defends Marx’s postulated essentialism from the charge that it commits ‘the naturalistic fallacy of deriving an “ought” from an “is” ’. He does so by appealing to MacIntyre’s argument in After Virtue ‘that values are often built in to premises, particularly when the premises are of a functional kind’,8 and to MacIntyre’s counter-charge that the ‘Enlightenment project’ of attempting to justify the rules of morality independently of what ‘is’ was bound to fail. MacIntyre’s teleological alternative, Wilde implies, gives the logical form that must be assumed by a Marxist morality. It has three parts: First, there is the idea of an ‘untutored’ human nature; second, the idea of man as he could be if he realized his telos; and third, the moral precepts which enable him to get from one stage to the other. The
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abandonment of the idea of an essential human nature striving towards a telos leaves the [first and third] elements suspended with no hope of mediation. The moral precepts cannot be derived from a view of untutored human nature, and so . . . are designed [by Enlightenment philosophers] to combat the inclinations of that nature . . . Ethical philosophers from Hume and Kant onwards work on why autonomous moral individuals ought to act, rigidly separating what we are from what we might be. They turn away from the Aristotelian conception of ‘man’ as always functional as well as purposive, and, furthermore, as always part of a community . . . Marx is very much in the Aristotelian tradition in terms of his essentialism . . . However, what is missing in Marx is an account of the ‘virtues’.9 Wilde also acknowledges that, in concluding After Virtue, ‘MacIntyre considers the possibility that Marx’s philosophy could provide the basis for a modern ethical disposition’, but asserts that MacIntyre ‘does so only in perfunctory fashion’. In contesting MacIntyre’s claim that Marxism cannot provide such a basis, and that it instead resorts ‘to “relatively straightforward versions of Kantianism or utilitarianism” ’ in moral argument, Wilde observes that Erich ‘Fromm provides a coherent discussion of the “virtues” necessary for the achievement of human freedom in his 1947 text, Man for Himself ’.10 Wilde may well be right but, as those Fromm engages in discussion there are Freud, Spinoza, Dewey and Aristotle but not Marx or any other Marxist, the text hardly makes a compelling case that a virtue ethics can be constructed from distinctly Marxist premises, let alone that one is already ‘built in to’ such premises. Other Western academics have tried to recast Marxism in an ethical form in another way. Rather than attempt to construct an ethics out of some distinctively Marxist humanism, many ‘analytical Marxists’ have attempted to do so out of the ‘methodology’ of individualism. This contrast can be drawn too starkly, given that the explorations of Marx’s ethics by Allen Wood and, most recently, Daniel Brudney combine something of humanist and analytical Marxisms. A stark contrast to humanist Marxism may, though, be found (in this volume) in Alan Carling’s asking of what socialists ‘want’, presuming that any such answer must be expressed in terms of abstract values or preferences that might be compared with and calculated alongside those proposed by liberals such as John Rawls or James Buchanan. What such ‘rational choice Marxism’ makes strikingly obvious is the Marxist tradition’s lack of any distinctive first principles. It is this philosophical foundation-
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lessness, rather than any demonstrable fallacy in some distinctive premises, that has permitted the tradition’s rapid dissolution.
Traditional Marxism What, at least, was shared by Kautsky, Lenin and Fromm was an intention to rival and defeat capitalism and its liberal ideology. This clear opposition may be traced back to what Gould and, following her, MacIntyre regard as ‘Marx’s ontology of individuals-in-relation’,11 an ontology that resembles Aristotle’s account of human beings as political animals. To this extent, Marxism was informed by an ontological principle distinct from the materialist premise of liberalism that what exists elementally in society is only individuals, and that ‘the human individual must . . . be viewed in abstraction from her or his social relationships and the human essence must be specifiable by reference only to properties possessed by individuals apart from and in independence of their social relationships’.12 It follows from liberalism’s atomistic premise, as Kant well perceived, that any ethic that goes beyond a simple contractualism – that any claims about what individuals ‘ought’ to do and about how they ‘ought’ to relate to one another – has to be articulated from some other basis than those of facts about human being. However, if we instead perceive ourselves as socially constituted and mutually ‘dependent rational animals’,13 no such conclusion is entailed. Unfortunately, Marx did not develop this premise of social individuality into a naturalistically humanist ethics. Instead, in The German Ideology, he and Engels elaborated what Brudney calls an ‘antiphilosophical’ and ‘sociological’ thesis which constitutes a ‘critique of morality’.14 For Brudney, it does not follow from this that we must endorse Althusser’s claim that Marx himself thereby replaced a philosophical (and therefore, for Althusser, ‘ideological’) epistemology with a scientific and historical one and with an anti-humanist and structuralist thesis.15 Nevertheless, even if Marx himself did not do so (at least, at this time), the Marxist tradition subsequently did. As Marx did not explicitly elaborate his sociological theory from an ontologically distinct premise, he allowed the ethical potential of that premise of social individuality to be lost from view in the Marxist canon. What was instead evident to Kautsky and Lenin as Marx’s philosophical legacy was what is known as his dialectical and historical materialism. This was elaborated and popularized by Engels in Anti-Dühring and in The Dialectics of Nature. The latter’s presentation of human nature
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in terms of ‘the part played by nature in the transition from ape to Man’ encapsulates what was compellingly presented as Marx’s post-Hegelian synthesis of historiographical, economic and Darwinian revolutions in humankind’s self-understanding (to which Fromm and others were later to try to add the self-revelations of psychoanalysis). What Marx did elaborate was a distinctive account of the relation between human labour and capital, the accumulated product of past labour. Under capitalism, according to his account, labour and its products embody a contradiction between their use value and their exchange value. Although Meikle demonstrates that even this can be interpreted in Aristotelian terms,16 the terms in which Marx presented it were historicist. At some point, he claimed, this contradiction would lead to one between what is required for the further development of the material forces of production and what is required for the continuation of the social relations of capitalist production. This, in turn, must eventually lead to some kind of revolutionary change, to the expropriation of capital by the working class, and to the creation of a society of associated producers and to their common ownership of non-human means of production. What is important in this causally explanatory and predictive theory is an account not of elemental human needs (which is what humanist Marxists attempt characteristically to elaborate) but of objectively conflicting class interests. The Marxist tradition, and especially the Marxist-Leninist tradition, held its truth-claims to be scientific and those of its rivals to be, in contrast, ideological. It held that its knowledge was superior to both the ideology of its rivals and the false consciousness of ordinary actors, a consciousness which was practically engendered by material conditions and theoretically warranted by such ideology. Marxism, by revealing the contradictions inherent in prevailing social conditions, could, it was claimed, free itself from the limitations of the present standpoint of capitalist civil society occupied by ordinary actors and liberal ideologists alike. For Leninists (including, but not only, those Leninists whom others castigate as Stalinists), this superior knowledge of an inevitable end could warrant any means to speed progress towards it. As ordinary actors are determined by material conditions, Marxists face no problem justifying compulsion or manipulation in getting them to act in whatever ways are required. Such claims of Marxism to a scientifically superior knowledge are now generally agreed to have been exploded. If Marxist predictions are falsifiable, then they have been by the development of capitalism and by the collapse of what used to be called actually existing socialism.
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Brudney and Wilde agree that if Marxist ideas are to have any future they must now be rephrased in a moral idiom. The idea of a contradiction inherent in reality must be represented as one between human nature and the nature of capitalism, between the need of capital to accumulate and the need of human beings to fulfil their potential. Its resolution must be presented as something which people ought rationally to choose, once the potential exists for an end to conflict over scarce resources, so as to end their mutual alienation by replacing individualism with socialism and private property with communism. This, however, is to present a future socialism as a matter of choice, and not of a choice between it and barbarism but between it and, for the majority, a materially comfortable (but) private life. Brudney acknowledges that, given Marx’s sociological critique of morality, it is arguable that the basic ideas of Marxism are not even compatible with an ethics. For him, Marx and Marxism always faced a ‘problem of justification’.17 If one is to do any more in opposition to capitalism than assert that its demise is inevitable, then that opposition requires a rationally justifiable moral condemnation of it. Such justification would involve advancing what Wilde calls ‘reasons why people ought to unite to change the world’. In The German Ideology, however, Marx replaced morality with sociology. To describe the book’s sociological thesis far more crudely than does Brudney, it is that conditions constrain consciousness and that present conditions are capitalist. This thesis gives rise to what Brudney calls, in the manner of analytical Marxism, the ‘collective action problem’ of ‘the first step’.18 Given that, as MacIntyre puts it, ‘in activities governed by the norms of civil society . . . the only available conception of a common good is one constructed from and reducible to conceptions of the goods pursued by various individuals in their attempts to satisfy their desires’,19 then how can workers break out from such capitalist consciousness and take the first step toward revolutionary activity?
MacIntyre’s post-Marxism As Wilde implies, Marxists could justify their opposition to capitalism by adopting MacIntyre’s virtue ethics. However, as Brudney’s argument implies, Marx’s sociology is incompatible with such an ethics. It is, therefore, important that MacIntyre has elaborated an anti-capitalist sociology which is not only not incompatible with his virtue ethics but which provides bases for it. What MacIntyre argues is an alternative to capitalism is not some utopian object of choice, of the kind that Marx
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and Engels were so critical, but something grounded in existing social relations. Values are to be based in facts, and theory in practice. Before contrasting MacIntyre’s sociology with that of Marx I shall, though, attempt to establish that there is nothing accidental about the consistency of MacIntyre’s ethics with much in Marxism. This is important because it follows that there would be nothing arbitrary about Marxists who recognize the necessity of recasting their anti-capitalist arguments in an ethical form adopting that of the virtues. Far from being ‘perfunctory’, as Wilde suggests, MacIntyre’s rejection of Marxism in After Virtue was, as he explained in introducing the book, the eventual product of his longstanding preoccupation with the question of the basis for the moral rejection of Stalinism. Many of those who rejected Stalinism [in 1956] did so by reinvoking the principles of that liberalism in the criticism of which Marxism originated. Since I continued, and continue, to accept much of the substance of that criticism, this answer was not available to me . . . Moreover I came to understand that Marxism itself has suffered from grave and harm-engendering moral impoverishment as much because of what it has inherited from liberal individualism as because of its departures from liberalism. The conclusion which I reached and which is embodied in this book . . . is that Marxism’s moral defects and failures arise from the extent to which it, like liberal individualism, embodies the ethos of the distinctively modern and modernizing world, and that nothing less than a rejection of a large part of that ethos will provide us with a rationally and morally defensible standpoint from which to judge and to act.20 One-time member of the Communist Party, the Socialist Labour League and the International Socialists, the problem that MacIntyre faced in the 1950s and ’60s was that of morally justifying opposition to both capitalism and actually existing socialism. It was only after spending years abortively attempting to identify premises for such opposition within Marxism, and only after writing books on Marx and Freud,21 that he had declared his aim instead to be ‘to create a genuinely post-Marxist ideology of liberation’,22 while also issuing a critique of Herbert Marcuse23 (of whom Wilde writes in tandem with Fromm).24 What MacIntyre thereby abandoned was his longstanding attempt to elaborate a ‘Marxist alternative to liberal morality’ that was distinct from Stalinists’ ‘means-ends model of morality’,25 as well as from the
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Kantian and voluntarist and the utilitarian and managerialist models of liberal morality which he saw many previous Marxists as having resorted to in moral argument. MacIntyre’s objection to humanist Marxism was that it cannot find adequate resources for a revolutionary morality in Marxism (or in Hegel). His objection to analytical Marxism would be that it simply capitulates to liberalism. His aim was to identify and elaborate a radical alternative to liberalism and capitalism. His criticism of Marxism as an entire anti-capitalist tradition is that it was never radical enough, because Marx abandoned philosophical enquiry before sufficiently elaborating premises for such an alternative. The standpoint which MacIntyre eventually identified as the best rationally and morally defensible one from which to judge and act in opposition to the ethos and institutions of capitalist civil society was that of Aristotelianism. This standpoint he describes as that of a particular tradition, but of a tradition which, like Marxism, makes strong claims to truth. The ethos of the modern, capitalist world is articulated by the post-Enlightenment, liberal tradition. This rival tradition separated subjects from objects, ‘ought’ from ‘is’, values from facts, and philosophy from science, attempting to find both self-evidently true foundations for factual knowledge and foundations for justifying the rules of morality that were autonomous from that positivistic knowledge of material reality. Marxists rejected post-Enlightenment philosophy but only to then try to replace it with a comprehensive post-Enlightenment science, to replace values with facts. Marxists thereby attempted to oppose liberal ideology, but did so upon the same positivistic premises that liberalism stood minus those various moral premises which informed liberals’ various models of political justification. This is why – even though Marxism might well be considered to have served as the very paradigm of a tradition for MacIntyre – he concluded After Virtue by asserting ‘that the claim of Marxism to a morally distinctive standpoint is undermined by Marxism’s own moral history’, ‘that Marxism is exhausted as a political tradition’, and that, following the collapse of the Enlightenment project into emotivism, we now face the alternatives of ‘Nietzsche or Aristotle’.26 The rationality of Enlightenment has, MacIntyre contends, been successfully deconstructed by postmodernist critiques of epistemology and of an independent morality, although, he argues, this critique does not work against teleological conceptions of truth and ethics.27 The alternative standpoints that increasingly confront one another are therefore those of a Nietzschean postmodernism and of a revived Aristotelianism. To accept the former would be to capitulate to a perspectivism or
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relativism that cannot but undermine radical social criticism and revolutionary politics, and that can therefore pose no alternative to the continued domination of state and capital.
‘A road not taken’ Brudney analyzes the famous Theses on Feuerbach, which Marx wrote immediately before The German Ideology, in terms of ‘three standpoints . . . : the standpoints of the philosopher, of civil society . . . and of social humanity’.28 The first two are, for Marx (and for MacIntyre), really converse sides of a single, capitalist coin; the one ideological, the other actual. The third is supposed to combine theory and practice, and is the standpoint to which Marx aspired. Brudney, however, describes ‘the standpoint of civil society . . . [as] the most effective standpoint for practical manipulation of the world, whether in the service of revolution or reaction. Of course, if one stipulates that to create a social revolution with the wrong orientation is to be conservative, then the standpoint of civil society is necessarily conservative. But that has not been the usual claim’.29 It is, though, precisely this claim that MacIntyre made in After Virtue against traditional Marxism, after noting that such manipulation of others is effectively legitimated by Weber’s Nietzschean ‘obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and nonmanipulative social relations’:30 As Marxists organize and move toward power they always do and have become Weberians in substance, even if they remain Marxists in rhetoric; for in our culture we know of no organized movement towards power which is not bureaucratic and managerial in mode and we know of no justifications for authority which are not Weberian in form. And if this is true of Marxism when it is on the road to power, how much more so is it when it arrives. All power tends to co-opt and absolute power co-opts absolutely.31 MacIntyre’s charge against Marxism is that, because it failed to free itself from liberal presuppositions in theory, it was co-opted by capitalist institutions in practice. What I have called actually existing socialism, MacIntyre learnt, as a Marxist, to call ‘state capitalism’. Marxist theory, he claims, issued in state capitalist institutions not because of any historical accident but because the former never separated itself adequately from the standpoint of civil society. The Theses on Feuerbach, as Wilde notes, ‘represent a decisive move
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away from . . . philosophical discourse’ in the sense of the standpoint of ‘an independent branch of knowledge’.32 For MacIntyre, just before he gave up on Marxism, what they represented was still a ‘conception of truth that enables Marx both to affirm a historical relativism concerning all philosophies and also to deny that his own philosophy is merely a product of the time, since it is in Marx’s own thought that philosophy has for the first time become conscious of its historical basis in seeking to transform that basis and has therefore passed beyond the limitations of earlier philosophy’.33 What MacIntyre’s engagement with Wittgensteinian arguments taught him, though, was that Marxists’ attempt to indict ‘other and rival theses and arguments’ for ‘distortions and limitations deriving from their authors’ historical and social context, while at the same time being able to exhibit one’s own theses and arguments, including one’s theses and arguments about their theses and arguments, as exempt from such distortion and limitation’, was ‘vulnerable to insuperable objections’.34 MacIntyre rejected Marxists’ claims to a knowledge that is scientifically superior to that of others for the good humanist reason that Marxists are subject to the same constraints of particularity as are other human beings. What the Theses represent for MacIntyre now is ‘a road not taken’.35 Because Marx ‘rejected philosophy . . . at a stage at which his philosophical enquiries were still incomplete and were still informed by mistakes inherited from his philosophical predecessors, Marx allowed his later work to be distorted by presuppositions which were in key respects infected by philosophical error’.36 The road not taken was that of elaborating the ontological first principle of individuals-in-relation into a social and ethical theory. This ontology is opposed to that which Meikle and others call atomism, the materialist and individualist premise that gave rise to the Enlightenment’s epistemological problem of how individuals can have certain knowledge of the external world. Hegel, for whom civil or bourgeois society was only part of a social totality, argued that in civil society human beings are misled into understanding themselves as existing prior to and apart from society. And Marx argued that by acting upon and changing our conditions we human beings affect our consciousness, not through individual choice but as a species. For Marx, then, as MacIntyre puts it, ‘in civil society . . . there has to be a contradiction, a cleavage between how individuals really and essentially are and how they understand themselves to be’. This false consciousness has been warranted and promoted by liberal theory, but although ‘to regard individuals as distinct and apart from their social relationships is a mistake of theory’ it is ‘not only a theoretical mistake.
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It is a mistake embodied in institutionalized social life. And it is therefore a mistake which cannot be corrected merely by better theoretical analysis’.37 In all of this MacIntyre agrees with Marx’s Theses, as he does with Marx’s rejection of epistemology. ‘The standpoint of civil society cannot be transcended, and its limitations adequately understood and criticized, by theory alone, that is, by theory divorced from practice, but only by a particular kind of practice, practice informed by a particular kind of theory rooted in that same practice.’38 But, for MacIntyre, Marx never did ‘the work of spelling out in detail the key distinction which the argument of the Theses on Feuerbach needs’. The kind of theory and practice that provides a standpoint from which that of civil society might be challenged was partially indicated, MacIntyre suggests, in Marx’s first thesis on Feuerbach. Here Marx asserted that human activity is ‘objective activity, taking over this expression’, as MacIntyre notes, ‘from Fichte and Hegel’. Had Marx gone further in juxtaposing this conception of activity to that actually effective in civil society, he would, MacIntyre claims, ‘have been compelled to articulate it in something very like Aristotelian terms. Hegel’s idiom is just not adequate to the task’.39 MacIntyre articulates it as . . . activity in which the end or aim of the activity is such that by making that end their own individuals are able to achieve something of universal worth embodied in some particular form of practice through cooperation with other such individuals. The relationships required by this type of end are such that each individual’s achievement is both of the end and of what has become her or his own end.40 Such activity is that which, in After Virtue and since, MacIntyre has discussed in terms of social practices. Having noted this, we may now turn to what MacIntyre regards as his Aristotelian sociology.
MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism In After Virtue, having noted that ‘a moral philosophy . . . characteristically presupposes a sociology’, MacIntyre identifies practices as the first premise of his virtue ethics.41 He there defines a practice as . . . any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of,
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that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.42 He elaborates the idea of a practice by distinguishing it from that of a mere technique, which does not involve a distinct kind of rationality. He also, crucially, differentiates between what he calls goods internal and goods external to practices. The good of becoming an excellent practitioner is internal to the practice and to its particular rationality, which one learns and internalizes as one puts the good of the practice before any conception of one’s own good that one had prior to entering the practice. In this way, practices become the schools of the virtues or moral excellences. Such goods are distinct from goods of effectiveness external to practices, such as money and power. If pursuit of the latter accumulative and zero-sum goods is allowed priority over that of goods of personal excellence, it leads to the instrumental manipulation of some persons by others. From the standpoint of civil society, ‘there are no ends except those which are understood to be the goals of some particular individual or individuals, dictated by the desires of those individuals’. ‘By contrast the ends of any type of practice involving what Marx calls objective activity are characterizable antecedently to and independently of’ such desires, allowing ‘participation in the activity to effect a transformation in the desires which [practitioners] originally brought with them to the activity’. This, MacIntyre takes it, is what Marx meant in the third thesis in writing of ‘a “coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity of self-changing” ’,43 which Marx therein went on to describe as ‘revolutionary praxis’. MacIntyre had been searching for an idiom in which to elaborate such a distinction for a long time. When at his most Marxist and Leninist, he had looked back to Hegel in attempting ‘to distinguish between two senses of “getting what one wants”. There is the sense in which to get what one wants is to follow and satisfy one’s immediate and short-term impulses; but there is also the sense in which to get what one wants is to attain what will in the long run and at every level in fact satisfy’.44 What is essentially and distinctively human is the latter sense of actualizing one’s desires, and one only learns what such essential goals are in community with others. Yet when, much later, he adopted Aristotelianism, he did not simply express the distinction as one between contingent wants and essential needs. Instead, he expressed it within ‘the threefold structure of untutored human-nature-as-it-
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happens-to-be, human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realizes-its-telos and the precepts of rational ethics as the means for the transition from one to the other’.45 It is this teleological structure that Wilde proposes to be the form that must be assumed by any Marxist morality capable of suggesting ‘reasons why people ought to unite to change the world’. Unlike Wilde, though, MacIntyre does not think that ‘Marx is very much in the Aristotelian tradition in terms of his essentialism’. The idiom for which Marx abandoned that of Hegel was the one of political economy. It is from this that Marx took the category of labour, to replace that of objective activity. For MacIntyre, alienated and exploited labour is something very different from what he identifies as practices. Where work ‘is put to the service of impersonal capital’, it ‘tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of the labour force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness, on the other’.46 Under capitalism, work is indeed reduced to the employment of labour power in isolation from other social relationships. Labour is something that is manipulated by managers, and is thereby . . . expelled from the realm of practices with goods internal to themselves. And correspondingly practices have in turn been removed to the margins of social and cultural life. Arts, sciences and games are taken to be work only for a minority of specialists: the rest of us may receive incidental benefits in our leisure time only as spectators or consumers.47 For MacIntyre, it is because capitalism affords no opportunity for people to realize their telos that its moral condemnation is rationally justified. His sociology resembles Marx’s in its stress upon not only theoretical rivalry but also practical conflict between two distinct standpoints.48 Unlike Marx’s, however, MacIntyre’s social and moral theory faces no insuperable ‘problem of justification’ nor of ‘the first step’, because the steps that an individual takes toward the telos of a social practice are also steps toward the fulfilment of their potential as a human being. Marx’s sociology of capitalism was premised upon the categories of labour and capital, and posed the whole of society as shaped by a mode of production in which the alienation of labour entails false consciousness. The problem of justification that Marx created for himself was that of how to identify a standpoint outside of that whole. MacIntyre, in contrast, juxtaposes practices to what he calls institutions. Whilst goods
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of excellence are internal to practices, goods of effectiveness are the currency of organizational institutions. Most practices require such institutions for their sustenance, but if they come to be dominated by institutions – as most workers are by capitalist corporations – then they, and their practitioners, are corrupted. Institutions and practices therefore provide bases for two rival kinds of consciousness, one that of the standpoint of civil society, the other outside of and opposed to it. This distinction between institutions and practices has another advantage over that between capital and labour for a revolutionary politics. Marx’s sociology not only generated a theoretical problem of justification but also, later, the practical problem of Stalinism or of co-optation by the state. State power was considered instrumentally. It may be the instrument of capital, but, for Kautsky in one way and for Lenin in another, it could be captured by Marxists and used as the means to effect the goal of communism. For MacIntyre, the instrumental rationality of the state is as much a danger as that of capitalist corporations, and ‘those who make the conquest of state power their aim are always in the end conquered by it and, in becoming the instruments of the state, themselves become in time the instruments of one of the several versions of modern capitalism’.49 What a teleological ontology, sociology and ethics would have told Marxists is that ends and means cannot be separated in the way they have traditionally presupposed.
After ethics MacIntyre is, still, all too often associated with those communitarians he has dismissed as ‘the children of the bourgeoisie playing with themselves’.50 Even Wilde, in noting that MacIntyre ‘concludes [After Virtue] that we are waiting for a new St Benedict’ and adding that this does not ‘inspire confidence in the possibility of political activity which can move us closer to the goal of an ethical community’,51 ignores MacIntyre’s citation in that conclusion of both ‘Trotsky and St Benedict’ as exemplars of political virtue.52 MacIntyre is not a communitarian because, like Marx, he thinks that capitalism precludes any possibility of widespread community in the present and that an ethical community can therefore only be created through theoretical contestation and practical conflict.53 His conception of ‘civil society’ is therefore similar to that of Marx and incompatible with that of contemporary communitarians. Perhaps he is even less of a communitarian than Marx, in that, for example, whereas
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contemporary communitarians follow Hegel in seeing the state as the actual representative of community, and even Marx allowed that a new kind of state would be the instrument by which community was to be created, MacIntyre denies any such possibility that the state can move us closer to some goal of community. There is no road through state power to a Communist end of history. Indeed, on MacIntyre’s account, veritable community cannot be achieved by being pursued as an end in itself but is supervenient on commitment to some other goal.54 In this, MacIntyre is again perhaps less of a communitarian than Marx. Brudney traces Marx’s attempt in the Theses on Feuerbach to solve his ‘justificatory problem’ in ‘something called “practice” ’ back to an earlier claim of Marx that ‘ “when communist workmen associate . . . they acquire a new need, the need for society, and what appears as a means becomes an end” ’.55 This illustrates (besides Marx’s communitarianism) an otherwise obscure link between Marx’s early premises and the kind of later Marxist practice commended by MacIntyre in endorsing Trotsky’s virtuousness. Trotsky exemplified political virtue in resisting institutional power in struggling to actualize an idea of communism that was part of a mistaken theory. However, it does not follow from the erroneousness of Marxist theory that the kind of oppositional and revolutionary practice to which he had committed himself had no good internal to it, only that any such good must be that not of a hypothetically future communism but of something already present in practice. The practice of ‘communist workmen’ and professional revolutionaries, as well as that of other workers who allow a transformation of their desires through their activity, can inform an ethics which, if premised upon a teleological conception of human nature, would stand in clear opposition to those contractualist, deontological, utilitarian, emotivist and postmodernist ethics that are promoted by and endemic to capitalist civil society. As a Marxist, MacIntyre had praised democratic centralism as the appropriate practice for Marxist theory because the . . . knowledge which Marxism puts at our disposal . . . is not a private possession . . . [but] rather a continually growing consciousness, which can only be the work of a group bound together by a common political and educational discipline. So the individual who . . . tries to have a mind entirely of his own . . . [is] likely to become in his thinking a passive reflection of the socially dominant ideas; while the individual who recognizes his dependence on others has taken a path which can lead to an authentic independence of mind.56
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What MacIntyre has retained from this is the idea that, by having a common end, groups can share a consciousness that rivals that of socially dominant ideas. What he denies is that the acquisition of state power by a political party is, any more than the acquisition of surplus value by a capitalist corporation, the kind of goal that can so transcend the standpoint of civil society, because such a party will be institutionalized by that power. Political virtue cannot be exemplified through impersonal forms of organization such as bureaucratic nation states, but only through the ordering of goods within smaller and interpersonal kinds of community. For MacIntyre, then, the only political activity that can move us closer to ethical community is that which resists domination by the manipulative institutions of state and capital, and which puts practices before institutions, goods of moral excellence before goods of instrumental effectiveness. This is to take the road indicated by Marx in the Theses and to draw a distinction between two kinds of activity, between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations. It must also be to go so far down that road as to oppose the Nietzschean sociology of an irredeemably disenchanted, demoralized world in which the only practices are ‘discursive’ ones of rhetorical manipulation constituting and legitimating different regimes of power, and in which the will to truth is only a mask for an irrational and impersonal will to power which renders impossible any shared political agency. Marxism’s traditional eschewal of ethics and dependence upon a positivistic epistemology and deterministic sociology made it vulnerable to Nietzscheanism, as evinced by the bit parts played in the rise of postmodernism by Gramsci and Althusser and by the post-Marxist road to postmodernism down which their erstwhile followers have been led.57 Encountering problems for its practice and theory arising from its failure to distinguish between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations, Marxists found it hard to contest the argument that their critique of capitalism is unjustifiable because there is no alternative to manipulation. ‘The nihilism of Stirner and Nietzsche’ must, as Wilde notes, be ‘anathema to ethical Marxism’.58 It must also be noted that Stirner’s nihilism was Marx’s primary target in The German Ideology. Marx there attempted to leave that engagement with past and present philosophers, such as Feuerbach, from which his own theory of practice had emerged. Above, I described Marx’s departure from a philosophy of social individuality for an antiphilosophical sociology as ‘unfortunate’, but it was undertaken for a reason. As Nicholas Lobkowicz explains, ‘Marx had to
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show that it was neither necessary nor possible to dismiss the [Left Hegelian] revolution against reality as nonsense; he had to show that there existed ideals which man simply could not give up’. ‘Marx’s line of defence’, in The German Ideology and thereafter, was to describe what Stirner attacked as ideals instead ‘as empirical facts which it is beyond man’s power to disregard’, so ‘that almost against his will Marx had been pushed into this dismissal of ideals by Stirner’.59 For this is what his defence against Stirner and therefore also the essence of Marx’s ‘materialistic conception of history’ amounts to: the ideals pursued by the Left Hegelians are declared to be the immanent te´los of history itself so that the Left Hegelian revolutionary drive becomes an immanent law of objective historical reality. The ought really is an is, a potentiality of history which reaches its maturity quite independently of whether people have ideals or do not have them.60 On Lobkowicz’s eminently reasonable account, it was in response to a precursor of Nietzsche’s arguments that Marx opted to eschew philosophy and ethics and instead adopt a positivistic epistemology, bequeathing to the Marxist tradition a fatal vulnerability to the Nietzschean challenge once the failure of the Enlightenment’s project became apparent. The road to a different, teleological conception of social practice, and to a teleological conception of ethics, which Marx had glimpsed when he wrote the Theses, was no longer available to be taken. If the original premises of Marxism were indeed those of an Aristotelian ontology, as Gould, Meikle, Wilde and others contend, then, as MacIntyre and Lobkowicz argue, Marxism very soon floated free from them.
After Marxism? In the Theses on Feuerbach, MacIntyre claims, Marx makes clear his disagreement with those who view the human condition from the standpoint of civil society, whether in the moral terms of subjective autonomy or the factual terms of objective determination. More particularly, Marx was concerned to distance himself from those who view themselves as rationally autonomous and others as objectively determined. Those who without abandoning the standpoint of civil society take themselves to know in advance what needs to be done to effect
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needed change are those who take themselves to be therefore entitled to manage that change. Others are to be the passive recipients of what they as managers effect. This hierarchical division between managers and managed is thus legitimated by the superior knowledge imputed to themselves by the managing reformers, who have cast themselves in the role of educator. Marx almost certainly had foremost in mind Robert Owen, who . . . was to have numerous successors in the subsequent history of socialism, among them both Lenin (at least on occasion) and Beatrice and Sidney Webb.61 Lenin, of course, thought that he was following the scientific socialism of Marx, not the utopian socialism of Owen, when he effected change upon others, but for MacIntyre rationalist utopianism and traditional Marxism were alike in claiming a superior knowledge. ‘Civil society is characterized not only by its abstract individualism, but by a particular way of envisaging the relationship between all theory, including social theory, and practice.’62 That this is so was seen by Marx in the Theses, the central assertion of which for MacIntyre is, as we have seen, that the standpoint of civil society can only be transcended ‘by a particular kind of practice, practice informed by a particular kind of theory rooted in that same practice’. But that this is so was lost sight of in the subsequent history of Marxism, with its construction of a factual science that purported to escape the constraints of a capitalist totality and explain the workings of that postulated totality to its inhabitants. That what is needed, if there is to be any possibility of political activity moving us closer to ethical community, is not some theoretically prescribed change that might be managed through the state but, rather, a kind of practice informed by a particular kind of theory rooted in that same practice may, now, seem strange even to humanist Marxists. Accordingly, Brudney concludes his study of ‘Marx’s attempt to leave philosophy’ by claiming that Marx’s ‘greatest philosophical interest, certainly at present, is as a utopian writer’.63 In the absence of an identifiable and plausible agency of socialist transformation, such as the proletariat once was, Marx is to be understood as indicating something like a total alternative to a present, capitalist totality. Such an alternative, abstracted from the present, is to be valued because it can tell us how we ought to live. MacIntyre, like Marx, disagrees. Social theory should no more idealize a hypothetical future than it should model itself upon the methodology of physics or of microeconomics. For MacIntyre, Marx’s critique of capitalist means of production is valuable because, once
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detotalized, it can help inform a moral philosophy that poses an alternative to capitalism which is not utopian but grounded in existing practice. Any utopian idea of total community would face a problem similar to that of Marxism’s traditional idea of communism, in that action is to be undertaken for some distant and impersonal goal. In contrast, those activities MacIntyre calls practices are ‘entitled to be called “revolutionary” ’ in the sense that they enable participants to ‘transform themselves and educate themselves through their own self-transformative activity, coming to understand their good as the good internal to that activity’.64 Where such practices inform the life of small-scale local communities (as MacIntyre notes they did, for example, in Marx’s time in ways described by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class65) they are likely to lead to revolutionary organization, having provided the first step in conscious opposition to the norms of capitalism. Where they do not inform such a common life they are, nevertheless, likely to engender virtues which ‘will be disruptive of and dysfunctional to the common life of [capitalist] social order’.66 The way in which MacIntyre’s substantive sociological and ethical theory challenges the standpoint of civil society is warranted by his metatheory of traditions.67 This acknowledges the coexistence of rival conceptual schemes, each with its particular criteria for truth, but contends that such rivalry, if rigorously pursued, is, in the long run, likely to establish which of those schemes is rationally superior to its rivals in making sense of extra-discursive reality. If Marxism served MacIntyre, albeit implicitly, as the paradigm of a tradition, it might well be thought that what is now widely called the death of Marxism is paradigmatic of what MacIntyre calls an epistemological crisis, in which a tradition reaches a point at which it can no longer both explain external reality and maintain internal coherence. Such a crisis makes a tradition vulnerable to capture by a rival that can account both for what it had accounted for and for why it can no longer progress from its original premises. I have, above, noted how so-called postmodernist post-Marxists have moved in precisely this way, from Marxism to Nietzscheanism. Yet, for MacIntyre, their retreat from Marxism’s strong conception of truth into a perspectivist relativism must lead to incoherence, and his defence of the Marxist heritage stresses that Marxism was not defeated, and we were not defeated, by the protagonists of the standpoint of civil society, who now mistakenly congratulate themselves on the collapse of Communist rule in so many states. Marxism was self-defeated and we too, Marxists and
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ex-Marxists and post-Marxists of various kinds, were the agents of our own defeats, in key part through our inability to learn in time some of the lessons of the theses on Feuerbach. The point is, however, first to understand this and then to start out all over again.68 The principal lesson to be learnt from the Theses on Feuerbach is that Marxism, in so far as it was able to clearly oppose the standpoint of civil society, had as its first principle an ontological and sociological road that was not taken, a conception of social individuality that was never elaborated into an ethical theory. Instead of elaborating this conception into an account of practices, institutions, moral rules and virtues that might have precluded the wrongs committed during the twentieth century in the name of communism, Marxists, following Marx’s own premature abandonment of philosophical enquiry, neglected this illiberal conception of social humanism in favour of a positivistic materialism. Marxism was, eventually, to experience epistemological crisis because, at its outset, it had failed to think through what its premise entailed and to ground itself in extant social practice rather than positivistic abstraction (the obverse of which is the kind of normative abstraction theorized by Kant and Rawls). On MacIntyre’s account, in other words, Marxism failed to change the world in practice because it had failed to break sufficiently from the standpoint of civil society in theory. Without ever capitulating to liberal atomism (at least until Western academics’ elaboration of a rational choice Marxism), Marxism was nevertheless co-opted by the state and capitalism because it had no philosophically and ethically warranted alternative. Liberals have long argued that any attempt to abandon the standpoint of civil society will lead to oppression, an argument that has now been taken up by postmodernists.69 But what Marxists must now do, if they are to renew and sustain their challenge to that standpoint beyond the millennium, is to go back and engage in the hard work of rethinking Marx’s premises. Only then will they be able to elaborate a social and ethical theory that is both given form by and in turn informs, and justifies, self-transformative and revolutionary social practice.
Notes 1. I thank Samantha Ashenden, Tolis Malakos and Rosa Mulé for comments. 2. I further relate the political philosophies of Hegel and Marx to that of Aristotle in Revolutionary Aristotelianism (Cambridge, Polity, forthcoming). 3. Carol Gould, Marx’s Social Ontology: Individuality and Community in Marx’s
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4.
5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
12. 13.
14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
21. 22.
Kelvin Knight Theory of Social Reality (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1978). Scott Meikle’s argument is advanced most fully in Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx (London, Duckworth/La Salle, Open Court, 1985). That there are significantly different ways in which Marx’s ontology may be understood to be Aristotelian is apparent from Jonathan E. Pike’s From Aristotle to Marx: Aristotelianism in Marxist Social Ontology (Aldershot, Ashgate, 1999). See the representative collection of essays edited by George E. McCarthy (himself a major protagonist of the Aristotelian interpretation of Marx), Marx and Aristotle: Nineteenth-century German Social Theory and Classical Antiquity (Savage, MT, Rowman & Littlefield, 1992). Lawrence Wilde, Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998). See also Wilde’s paper in this volume. Ibid. p. 145; Wilde’s emphasis. Ibid. pp. 10, 30; Wilde’s emphases. Ibid. pp. 34–5. Ibid. p. 146; Wilde’s emphasis. Ibid. pp. 147–8. Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken’ (1994), in Kelvin Knight (ed.), The MacIntyre Reader (Cambridge, Polity/Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1998) p. 225. Ibid. p. 228. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (London, Duckworth/La Salle, IL, Open Court, 1999). In this, MacIntyre’s fullest account of human nature, he emphasizes the ethical significance of human vulnerability and dependency in a way that contrasts with Gould’s further account of Marx’s ‘ontology of labor’ as the self-transformatively causal power of the human species. (He also cites ‘Marx’s formula for justice in a socialist society’ as appropriate to relations between those relatively independent and ‘a revised version of Marx’s formula for justice in a communist society’ as appropriate to relations between them and those most dependent, calling that revision the norm consistent with a virtue of just generosity; Dependent Rational Animals, pp. 130–31). I do not claim that the two perspectives are necessarily incompatible, only that they have not yet been successfully combined. Daniel Brudney, Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1998). Ibid. pp. 318–22. Besides Scott Meikle, Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx, see Aristotle’s Economic Thought (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995). Brudney, Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy (note 14) p. 197ff. Ibid. pp. 257–60. MacIntyre, ‘The Theses on Feuerbach’ (note 11) p. 225. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1984/London, Duckworth, 1985, 2nd edn) pp. ix–x; MacIntyre’s emphasis. Marxism: An Interpretation (London, SCM Press, 1953); The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis (London, Routledge, 1958). Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Philosophy and Ideology: Introduction to Part Two’, in MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy
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23. 24. 25.
26. 27. 28.
29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.
49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.
(London, Duckworth, 1971/Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1978) p. 93. Alasdair MacIntyre, Marcuse (London, Collins, 1970) and Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic (New York, Viking, 1970). Wilde, Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics (note 5) pp. 51–76. Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’ (1958–59), in The MacIntyre Reader (note 11) p. 36. First published in The New Reasoner, this essay is MacIntyre’s most important expression of a humanist Marxism. MacIntyre, After Virtue (note 20) pp. 261, 262, 256; MacIntyre’s emphases. He best explains why this is so in ‘First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Issues’ (1990), in The MacIntyre Reader (note 11). Brudney, Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy (note 14) p. 251. He follows Marx’s tenth thesis in describing the standpoint of civil society as that of the old materialism, that of social humanity as that of the new materialism. Ibid. p. 403. MacIntyre, After Virtue (note 20) p. 23. Ibid. p. 109. Wilde, Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics (note 5) pp. 19–20. Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (1968) (London, Duckworth, 1995, 2nd edn) pp. 60–61. Ibid. p. xix. MacIntyre, ‘The Theses on Feuerbach’ (note 11). Ibid. p. 224. Ibid. pp. 228–9. Ibid. p. 225. Ibid. pp. 225–6; MacIntyre’s emphasis. Ibid. pp. 225–6. MacIntyre, After Virtue (note 20) pp. 23, 186–7. Ibid. p. 187. MacIntyre, ‘The Theses on Feuerbach’ (note 11) pp. 225–6. Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Freedom and Revolution’, Labour Review 5/1, Feb. 1960, 19–24, p. 20. MacIntyre, After Virtue (note 20) p. 53. Ibid. p. 227. Ibid. pp. 227–8; MacIntyre’s emphasis. A text that reveals how much MacIntyre’s metatheory of traditions derived from his sociology of conflict is ‘Social Science Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority’ (1979), in The MacIntyre Reader (note 11) especially pp. 67–8. MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (note 33) p. xv. Alasdair MacIntyre, quoted in Robert Song, Christianity and Liberal Society (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997) p. 128. Wilde, Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics (note 5) p. 149. MacIntyre, After Virtue (note 20) pp. 256, 262–3; MacIntyre’s emphasis. See Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’ (1997), in The MacIntyre Reader (note 11). I here paraphrase Song’s summary of MacIntyre in Christianity and Liberal Society (note 50) p. 129. Brudney, Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy (note 14) pp. 225–6; my ellipsis.
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56. 57. 58. 59.
60. 61.
62. 63. 64. 65. 66.
67. 68. 69.
Kelvin Knight Brudney is quoting from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts which Marx wrote in 1844, the year before he wrote the Theses and began co-writing The German Ideology. MacIntyre quotes the same passage to make the same point; ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’ (note 25) p. 47. MacIntyre, ‘Freedom and Revolution’ (note 44) p. 24. For the example of Laclau and Mouffe, see Paul Reynolds’s paper in this volume. Wilde, Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics (note 5) p. 147. Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1967) pp. 406–7, 413; Lobkowicz’s emphasis. Ibid. p. 408; Lobkowicz’s emphases. MacIntyre, ‘The Theses on Feuerbach’ (note 11) p. 231. This is a lesson that MacIntyre learnt long ago from Marx’s Theses; see ‘Breaking the Chains of Reason’, in E. P. Thompson (ed.), Out of Apathy (London, Stevens & Sons, 1960), especially pp. 211–12. He repeated it in After Virtue (note 20) pp. 84–5. MacIntyre, ‘The Theses on Feuerbach’ (note 11) p. 229. Brudney, Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy (note 14) p. 363. MacIntyre, ‘The Theses on Feuerbach’ (note 11) p. 231. Ibid. pp. 231–2. On the politics of local community, see ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’ (note 53) pp. 246–50. Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘S o ¯ phrosun¯e: How a Virtue Can Become Socially Disruptive’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13. 1988, 1–11, p. 11. See also ‘Natural Law as Subversive: The Case of Aquinas’, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26/1, Winter 1996, 61–83. See Kelvin Knight, ‘Introduction’, in The MacIntyre Reader (note 11). Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘The Theses on Feuerbach’ (note 11) p. 234. See especially Dominique Colas, Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997).
5 Habermas on Theory and Political Practice Peter M. R. Stirk
The presumptive connection between theory and practice in Habermas’s work requires little justification. He has identified himself as an heir to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. This critical theory proclaimed that Its opposition to the traditional concept of theory springs in general from a difference not so much of objects as of subjects . . . The scholarly specialist ‘as’ scientist regards social reality as extrinsic to him, and ‘as’ citizen exercises his interest in them through political articles, membership in political parties or social service organizations, and participation in elections. But he does not unify these two activities . . . except, at best, by psychological interpretation. Critical thinking, on the contrary, is motivated today by the effort really to transcend the tension between the individual’s purposefulness, spontaneity and rationality, and those work relationships on which society is built. (Max Horkheimer)1 Despite Habermas’s own, increasingly severe, objections to the arguments of the original Frankfurt School he has continued to portray himself as an advocate of critical theory.2 This self-understanding has been reflected in his own career. His public interventions have led to him being denounced, often in vitriolic terms, from all sides. During the days of the radical student movements of the 1960s he was accused of lacking solidarity with the students. Later he came under fire from conservative politicians and academics who denounced critical theory as an inspiration for the terrorism of the 1970s.3 A decade later he played a prominent role in a highly public dispute between historians about the Third Reich. Even in more 97
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restrained academic debate the political dimension of Habermas’s work has rarely been far from the surface. It was with some justice that one commentator devoted a book to depicting Habermas as ‘a practical agent in the ideological maelstrom of the Federal Republic’.4 The point of the Max Horkheimer’s definition of critical theory was that the political engagement of the self-avowed critical theorist had to enter into his understanding of theory. Political engagement could not be something external to theoretical reflection. Theory and political practice were not to be assigned to different roles, the scientist and the citizen, which any individual might adopt. For Horkheimer the Marxist paradigm was still predominant. Critical theory, that is, a re-formulated Marxism, was to act as an instrument of enlightenment which would contribute to a broader political practice, revolution. Echoes of this could still be found in Habermas’s approval of groups which pushed workers ‘to think about real working conditions, and real gains in terms of self-determination more than in terms of social rewards of the conventional type, for example more money and free time’.5 But for both Horkheimer and Habermas this activist conception scarcely fitted the times. Horkheimer soon succumbed to a pessimism in which the possibility of enlightenment shrank to a vanishing point.6 Habermas has remained more optimistic but he too has grown more cautious. For Horkheimer the difficulty lay both in socio-political trends and in the theoretical endeavour itself. According to the later version of his critical theory, the dialectic of enlightenment was entwined in the continuum of domination. Habermas’s intellectual trajectory has followed a less dramatic course, though the early promise of a strong link between theory and practice has faded. Indeed, it has become a more or less constant refrain among commentators that the link is difficult to discern at all.7 Assessment of Habermas’s view of the relationship between theory and practice has tended to focus on the theory part of the pair, but his conception of political practice has played an equally important role. Indeed, in Theory and Practice it was the latter which formed the benchmark. There, Habermas set out from the ancient conception of practice as communal deliberation about the pursuit of the good life. According to this conception political practice was not informed by either technical skill or theoretical knowledge in the strict sense. It was phronesis, prudential judgement, which was supposed to guide the ancient practice of politics. But, Habermas laments, ‘Wherever we encounter the latter, it seems hopelessly old-fashioned to us’.8 One of the reasons which he cited as responsible for contemporary puzzlement was a
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changed understanding of theory. Taking Hobbes as symbolic of the new understanding of theory, Habermas describes the emergence of a conception of theory which was oriented to practice in one sense but completely alien to it in another. This theory has three prime characteristics: First, the claim of scientifically grounded social philosophy aims at establishing once and for all the conditions for the correct order of the state and society as such . . . Second, the realization or application of knowledge is a technical problem . . . Third, human behaviour is therefore to be now considered only as material for science. The engineers of the correct order can disregard the categories of ethical social intercourse and confine themselves to the construction of conditions under which human beings . . . will behave in a calculable manner.9 Two things are striking in Habermas’s summary. The first is the relationship between a scientifically constructed model and the real world. The relationship itself is one of implementation. It is akin to ancient notion of techne. In the modern, Hobbesian, understanding of theory, theory is ‘designed for “application” ’ and hence, Habermas continues, acquires a new criterion. Theories are valid insofar as we are able to make the objects which the theories describe.10 Second, Habermas does not agree with the ‘disregard of ethical social intercourse’ which he ascribes to the new theory, that is, with the disregard of the ancient conception of practice. His conclusion is that ‘the moderns achieved the rigour of their theory at the cost of access to praxis’.11 Habermas’s response to the shortcomings of the moderns was to seek to undermine their conception of theory, and hence to restore political practice to its rightful place. But there could, of course, be no direct return to the ancient condition. More important, the gap between the ancient and the modern condition induced Habermas to stress a different conception of practice. Ancient political practice had been based upon a set of assumptions about human nature and the good life, which, in turn, was held to be within the grasp of the citizens of the city states. Now, from the modern perspective, ‘the realization of the good, happy and rational life has been stretched out along the vertical axis of world-history . . . rational praxis is now interpreted as liberation from externally imposed compulsion, just as the theory which is guided by this interest of liberation is interpreted as enlightenment’.12 This conception of practice, practice as liberation points back to the Marxist
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paradigm as soon as the role of theory in dispelling dogma, delusion, or whatever blocked enlightenment, is stressed. That, however, was not Habermas’s prime concern. His prime concern was with the ‘scientization of politics’, the triumph of the modern conception of theory over the ancient conception of practice. Again, there could be no direct escape to ancient verities. There could be no return to a conception of theory divorced from its technical application. Indeed Habermas sought to stress this link between modern theory and practice, practice in the sense of techne. He did so in order to criticize the self-understanding of modern, positivistic science. Ironically, that self-understanding disavowed any interest in technical implementation. Science, says Habermas, was seen as pure theory, but also as the sole form of reason. Everything else was relegated to the realm of arbitrary value preferences. That is, practice in the ancient political sense was dissolved into a realm of competing and conflicting values. At this point it is clear that Habermas was seeking to defend an alternative form of practice against the pretension of the technical understanding of practice. The idea of science as pure theory was, from this perspective, an illusion which had the effect of banishing competing forms of practice. Thereby it left the field clear for a scientistic form of politics. What was not always so clear, was which alternative form of practice Habermas wished to defend. Or, to be more precise, Habermas tended to elide defence of practice akin to the ancient conception and defence of practice as enlightenment and liberation. Thus, he complained that ‘According to the principles of an analytic philosophy of science, empirical questions which cannot be posed and solved in the form of technical tasks cannot therefore expect to receive a cogent theoretical answer’.13 He also complained that with the triumph of the positivistic conception, ‘The dimension in which acting subjects could arrive rationally at agreement about goals and purposes is surrendered to the obscure area of mere decision among reified values and irrational beliefs’.14 The emphasis in these two quotes is different. The latter points back to the ancient conception of practice, the former draws on the modern idea of practice as enlightenment. In the ancient conception of practice there was no place for ‘a cogent theoretical answer’. But there was in the tradition of political practice as liberation. That Habermas wished to retain both elements, and indeed to fuse them, is evident in his comments on ‘Some Difficulties in the Attempt to Link Theory and Praxis’. There he set his comments in the context of Lukács’s subordination of everything to the primacy of the Party and
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its strategic success. Ultimately, this primacy was based upon the Party’s claim to privileged theoretical insight, which Lukács sought to guarantee by giving the Party authority to prohibit theoretical debate in the interest of organizational considerations. Habermas countered by outlining three stages in the link between theory and praxis: theoretical debate, enlightenment, and tactical decisions. The differences between them become clearer in the light of the purpose of each: ‘On the first level, the aim is true statements, on the second, authentic insights, and on the third, prudent decisions’.15 The first level is relatively straightforward. The second level is not. Here, theory has a role in inducing enlightenment, but it is a limited one. According to Habermas, ‘The practical consequences of self-reflection are changes in attitude which result from insight into causalities in the past’.16 Theory, then, cannot prescribe what enlightened men are to do. This is consistent with an attempt to restore the ancient conception of practice, but Habermas places the emphasis elsewhere. Under the influence of his initial distinction between theoretical debate, enlightenment, and tactical decision, he refers to the ‘risks’ involved in the latter. It is these risks about which enlightened men must take prudent decisions.17 At this stage Habermas’s attempt to run together practice as enlightenment and practice akin to the ancient conception is a cause of some confusion. But the underlying intent can be discerned. Theory, which makes assertions about causalities, cannot be allowed to extend its remit over political practice, for then it would displace the ‘ethical social intercourse’, which alone can justify political action. Here the ancient conception of practice provides the benchmark. On the other hand, the assumption of the need for enlightenment and liberation justifies a need for a theory which will explain, in a causal manner, why men are in the thrall of dogma or ideology. Only during and, even more so, after enlightenment do men acquire the capacity for political action in the ancient sense. Now these two models cannot both be true at the same time. The former presumes a capacity for a kind of political practice which the latter model sees as the end product of a historical process. This is the consequence of the idea that ‘the realization of the good, happy and rational life has been stretched out along the vertical axis of world-history’. In his subsequent work Habermas retained elements of this model of enlightenment but substantially modified his conception of the role of theory. Put briefly, Habermas replaces the history of enlightenment, in which theory is required to induce enlightenment. Its place is taken by
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a theory of modernization that performs a similar function. The ‘realization of the good, happy and rational life’ is still ‘stretched out along the vertical axis of world-history’. But whereas earlier Habermas still located enlightenment in the future, as had early critical theory, modernization is something that has already taken place. In the process, of course, Habermas’s conception of both theory and political practice changed. Before moving on to his revised version it is necessary to comment briefly upon the defence of the link between theory and practice in Knowledge and Human Interests. In retrospect this can be seen as something of a detour which muddied the waters, at least as far as the relation between theory and practice is concerned. For reasons which cannot be elaborated here, Habermas argued for the existence of ‘knowledge constitutive interests’. There were in fact three such interests, the technical, practical and emancipatory. The term interest automatically suggests a connection with practice, and since these interests were constitutive of knowledge the implied link between theory and practice seemed strong. But Habermas was using the term interest in an unusual way. He defined it as follows: ‘I term interests the basic orientations rooted in specific fundamental conditions of the possible reproduction and self-constitution of the human species, namely work and interaction. Hence these basic orientations do not aim at the gratification of immediate empirical needs . . .’.18 The basic orientations are evidently not the interests of individuals or even of social groups in the normal sense. They are, rather, sets of assumptions which we make, and must make, about the world. They are epistemological assumptions.19 Underlying the theory of knowledge constitutive interests was the same set of conceptions of practice, the practice of the technician, practice as ‘ethical social discourse’ and practice as liberation. There was also a similar problem relating to the latter two. On the one hand, Habermas insists that ‘the intersubjectivity of mutual understanding in ordinary-language communication and in action according to norms’ is essential to society.20 On the other hand, ‘As long as human beings must sustain their life through work and interaction subject to instinctual renunciation, in other words under the pathological compulsion of deformed communication, the interest of self-preservation necessarily takes the form of the interest of reason, which only develops through critique and confirms itself through the practical consequences of critique’.21 Leaving aside the complications involved in supposing that instinctual renunciation can, potentially, be dispensed with, and the
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equation of instinctual renunciation and deformed communication, one thing is clear. This interest is an interest in liberation. Habermas did not persist with the strategy of Knowledge and Human Interests. He conceded to his critics that it suffered from various weaknesses, especially from a failure to distinguish between two senses of reflection. Reflection meant, in the first place, ‘reflexion upon the conditions of potential abilities of a knowing, speaking and acting subject as such’.22 In order to distinguish this from the other sense of reflection Habermas designated this kind of operation as reconstruction. The other sense of reflection involved criticism of pseudo-objective constraints, particularly as they affect individual or group identities. This criticism ‘is characterized by its ability to make unconscious elements conscious in a way which has practical consequences’.23 In contrast reconstruction does not have practical consequences. In Knowledge and Human Interests Habermas had primarily been engaged in what he now designated reconstruction, but he had conflated this with ‘criticism’. The new distinction left Habermas with two types of theory, one of which abandoned the connection between theory and practice.24 The other, ‘critical’, type of theory retained the strong link between theory and practice, the practice in question being the practice of liberation. But it was reconstruction which subsequently formed the focus of Habermas’s efforts. In terms of his conception of the relation between theory and practice, Habermas’s revision of historical materialism was an important stage. Put briefly, what Marx had bundled together Habermas sought to pull part. At the beginning of ‘Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism’ Habermas noted that Marx employed his historical materialism ‘in the role of historian, to interpret particular historical situations or developments’.25 This simple point is, of course, of great relevance to the link between theory and practice. In Habermas’s reconstruction that particular link, between the theory of historical materialism and specific histories, was severed. Habermas proposed to ‘separate the logic from the dynamics of development – that is, the rationally reconstructible pattern of a hierarchy of more and more comprehensive structures from the process through which empirical substrates develop’.26 Habermas argued that there were good theoretical reasons for doing this and he may have been right. That, however, is not at issue here. The important point here is the consequences of his decision. The consequence is that Habermas’s pursuit of greater theoretical rigour was purchased at the cost of greater distance from the practice of specific groups. This change in the status of historical materialism involved a
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change in the status of theory. It did not necessarily entail any change in Habermas’s understanding of practice. But it suggests a change in emphasis. It suggests that Habermas would not focus on practice as liberation. By Habermas’s own account ‘Criticism [as opposed to reconstruction] is brought to bear on something particular – concretely speaking, on the particular self-formation process of an ego, or group, identity’.27 To the extent that Habermas cut off his own theory’s relationship to the ‘dynamics of development’, surrendering that to ‘narrative history’, he weakened his theory’s relationship to practice as liberation.28 It was, however, his theory of modernization that dealt an even greater blow to that linkage. In The Theory of Communicative Action Habermas set out to counter the theory of modernization, especially that elaborated by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment and that elaborated by Max Weber. Both portrayed modernization, for different reasons, as the unavoidable triumph of ‘instrumental rationality’. The prime victim of this is the ‘ethical social discourse’ which Habermas wishes to defend. ‘Ethical social discourse’ becomes impossible, or rather meaningless, because the norms which form the focus of such discourse are exposed as illusions. Alternatively, it becomes impossible because a choice between competing norms cannot be justified. Habermas’s strategy involved accepting the logic of modernization, neither lamenting the demise of the Protestant ethic in the manner of Weber, nor indicting enlightenment for self-destruction in the manner of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Habermas’s defence of modernization proceeded in two stages. First, he distinguished between two forms of rationalization which the pessimists had wrongly conflated. Rationalization in one sense meant that traditional, unquestioned, norms and customs became problematic and hence the subject of debate. Rationalization in another sense meant the development of specialized subsystems of society, each of which had its own logic and criteria. Prime among the latter are the state and the modern, capitalist economy. It was wrong to confound the two because then the success oriented strategies appropriate to the state and economy is taken as characteristic of rationalization in general.29 Second, Habermas distinguished between different spheres which separated out as traditional, custom bound, assumptions came into question. In each realm a new consensus could only be achieved discursively. The criterion in each realm was different: truth, rightness, sincerity and so on.30 That difference is important because it
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allowed Habermas to rescue ‘ethical social discourse’ from the realm of subjective preference, without denying that questions of truth and rightness are different. In all three cases rationality could be secured by supplying good reasons for a particular statement. According to Habermas this applies equally to scientific, moral and aesthetic claims. Within this framework there are two things that Habermas strives to defend. The first is the importance of normative action. His assumption is that this is essential to societies, that mere considerations of utility are insufficient to secure social stability.31 In modern societies, as the authority of tradition weakens, such norms can only be secured by ‘ethical social discourse’. The second is the lifeworld. By this Habermas means the social realm out of which specialized subsystems, markets, states and so on, develop. The important characteristics of the lifeworld, as Habermas understands it, are the fact that it encompasses all members of society and that the level of discourse is accessible to all. To the extent that specialized discourses, medicine, law and so on develop and become inaccessible to ordinary members of society, they, by definition, separate out from the lifeworld. Equally important, the lifeworld itself is not static. It is characterized in large part by custom but it is subject to rationalization. This has implications for Habermas’s conception of theory and practice. More precisely, it entails limits to theory, limits to practice which are, so to speak, rooted in practice itself, and limits to practice which arise from the institutional structure of modern societies. The prime limit to theory arises from Habermas’s conviction that normative validity can only be secured through ethical social discourse. These discourses ‘have to be carried through in fact and cannot be replaced by monological mock dialogue’.32 Habermas understands this quite literally and hence rules out Kant’s strategy whereby each is enjoined to ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’.33 His intent is quite clear, to exclude any theoretical pre-emption of ‘ethical social discourse’. Hence, Questions regarding the ideal validity of norms, whether for the theoretician or for those involved themselves, can be posed only in the performative attitude of an actor (or of a participant in discourse), whereas questions concerning the social ‘validity’ or currency of norms, questions of whether norms and values are or are not actually recognized within a group, have to be dealt with in the objectivating attitude of a third person.34
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In so far as theory can be equated with the ‘objectivating attitude of a third person’ this does open up scope for theory. So to does the development of specialized subsystems of society. As such a system emerges it ‘escapes from the intuitive knowledge of everyday communicative practice, and is henceforth accessible only to the counter-intuitive knowledge of the social sciences’.35 This is an important concession to the scope of theory, and equally an important restriction for the scope of practice. It is, indeed the limits to the scope of practice which are striking in The Theory of Communicative Action. The most important of these demarcates Habermas’s concept of practice from the ancient concept. In Theory and Practice he had explicitly invoked the ancient concept and its pursuit of the good life. Now, however, he sought to distinguish between questions of justice and happiness, morality and ethics, universally valid norms and desirable identities. The former can be established through discourse and are rational in a way the latter are not. Habermas’s reason for this claim is that, ‘Moral judgement presupposes a hypothetical outlook, the possibility of considering norms as something to which we can grant or deny social validity. The analogous assumption that we could choose forms of life in the same way is a contrast without sense. No one can reflectively agree to the form of life in which he has been socialized in the same way as he can to a norm of whose validity he has convinced himself’.36 It might seem that Habermas is following ancient conception in so far as he relates choices about the good life to the contingent circumstances of those concerned. On the other hand he insists, albeit equivocally, on the irrationality or deficient rationality of the choice. Thus in the choice of the good life ‘[t]here is an indissoluble element of arbitrariness’.37 Somewhat weaker is the assertion that ‘Insofar as a person does make his decision about who he wants to be depend on rational deliberation, he orients himself not by moral standards but by the standards of happiness and wellbeing that we intuitively use to judge forms of life as well’.38 In making what he takes to be a strong case for moral discourse Habermas has equipped moral discourse with characteristics, above all universality, which push him to separate it out from ethical choices. The contingencies of political life induce other restrictions on practice understood as discourse whose outcome is agreement on how we ought to act. Habermas argues that such discourse is induced by a clash of interests. He even emphasizes the link between morality and interest insofar as ‘existing norms gain action motivating force to the degree that the values embodied in them represent the standards according to
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which . . . needs are interpreted’.39 On the other hand, Habermas is so concerned to salvage the importance of normative social integration that he disparages utilitarian considerations. He has a second reservation about interests. Interests, for Habermas, are contingent. He quotes, approvingly, Durkheim’s assertion that ‘There is nothing less constant than interests’.40 Interests are also often intractable. The common solution, of course, is to look for compromises. This Habermas accepts, but with an important qualification. ‘Negotiating compromises’ he writes, ‘does not at all serve to redeem validity claims in a strictly discursive manner, but rather to harmonize nongeneralizable interests on the basis of balanced positions of power’.41 Again Habermas seeks to secure the validity of normative action at the expense of shrinking its remit. It is the balance of power not deliberation which underlies compromise. The same pattern emerges when Habermas focuses on the institutional structure of modern societies, though here there is a strong ambivalence. One would expect Habermas to defend the lifeworld against the claims of the sub-systems that have emerged from them. One would expect him to defend the realm of shared meanings, of a level of discourse accessible to all, of actual discourses about problematic issues, against the strategic action which he ascribes to political and corporate elites, against the hermetically sealed discourse of experts, and against the imposition of regulations from above. Indeed he does, but he also concedes an important role to the specialized subsystems, primarily the economy and the state. His argument is clearest in relation to the market economy. Here we find ‘mechanisms that stabilize the nonintended interconnections of actions by way of functionally intermeshing action consequences’ and hence a ‘nonnormative regulation of individual decisions that extends beyond the actors’ consciousnesses’.42 This is the classical model of the free market. Habermas is, of course, well aware of the extent to which modern economies deviate from this model, but nevertheless he clearly believes that some characteristics of that model still apply. The crucial characteristics are that action is not norm driven, that the market does perform an integrative function, but that it does so in a way which is beyond both the grasp and the intention of market agents. Why should Habermas approve of this? The answer lies again in the rigours of his characterization of discursively validated norms and his awareness of the difficulty of reaching consensus. Put simply, questioning established conventions is a risky business. There is no guarantee that a new consensus will be reached. There are severe, but unspecified, limits to how many norms can be called into question
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without overburdening society’s capacity to deal with them. Hence the virtue of alternative forms of integration. In Habermas’s words, Unfettering normative contexts and releasing communicative action from traditionally based institutions – that is, from obligations of consensus-loads (and overloads) the mechanism of reaching understanding with a growing need for coordination. On the other hand, in two central domains of action, institutions are replaced by compulsory associations and organizations of a new type; they are formed on the basis of media that uncouple action from processes of reaching understanding and coordinate it via generalized instrumental values such a money and power.43 There are of course, problems with Habermas’s conception of markets and market agents. Market agents do not necessarily act in strictly nonnormative ways and in some markets at least it is doubtful if we can speak of ‘the nonintended interconnections of actions’. But these objections are relatively slight compared with those which his reference to power raises. Habermas, under the influence of Talcott Parsons, suggests that power performs the same sort of function as money in a market. Habermas concedes that power is not measurable, that there is no analogy to prices, that power ‘cannot circulate in so unrestricted a manner as money’, that ‘power cannot be so reliably deposited as money in bank’.44 It is, however, far from clear that power circulates at all or that it can be deposited. Money circulates and can be deposited because, as a universal equivalent, it is totally indifferent to the exchanges it facilitates or to the persons it belongs to. Power, whatever else it is, is a characteristic of relationships between people. Habermas’s analogy between power and money may be dubious, and opaque, but its significance is clear. Whole tracts of what are customarily understood as political practice are withdrawn from the realm of possible discourse. Having made these major concessions Habermas seeks to set limits to what he calls the ‘colonization’ of the lifeworld. Here he laments the failure to develop ‘institutions of freedom that protect communicatively structured areas of the private and public spheres against the reifying inner dynamics of the economic and administrative systems’.45 Of particular concern to him is the growth of the administrative system which accompanies the welfare state. Put generally he is concerned by what he sees as the reduction of citizens to the role of clients of the administrative system. In The Theory of Communicative Action practice as liberation has faded
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into the background. Habermas even notes that the contemporary problem is not ‘false consciousness’ but ‘fragmented consciousness’.46 It is a modified form of the ancient conception of practice which moves into the foreground. It might be objected that this is no longer the ancient conception at all, since it excludes deliberation on the good life, it is supposed to issue in universally valid norms and its relationship to interests is problematic. Habermas has explicitly rejected neoAristotelian solutions on the grounds that they cannot identify the ‘good life’, that they cannot find a modern equivalent for Aristotle’s phronesis and that they are inherently conservative.47 On the other hand, Habermas’s conception excludes theoretical prescription, emphasizes discourse and does seek to endow norms with a form of rationality. After The Theory of Communicative Action Habermas invoked the ‘insight into the fundamental primacy of practice over reason’ but warned that this did not have to lead to ‘radical skepticism about reason’.48 It did not have to because reason was at work, albeit not in a prescriptive sense, in practice. Even if the differences are judged to be greater than the similarities it seems that Habermas has given precedence to a modified conception of ‘ethical social discourse’ at the expense of conceiving practice as liberation.49 That emphasis is continued in Faktizität und Geltung where Habermas seeks to claw back some of the ground he conceded in The Theory of Communicative Action, strengthening both the role of theory and the role of practice, though not necessarily the connection between the two. In Faktizität und Geltung he sets out to justify the Rechtsstaat and to argue that it can only be justified in connection with a radical theory of democracy. The two elements, law and democracy, are, he claims the only two to have withstood the dissolution of the religious and metaphysical traditions. ‘Human rights and the principle of popular sovereignty’, he writes, ‘are, not accidentally, the ideas in the light of which alone modern law can be justified’.50 These two principles are evident in the list of basic rights which he specifies. The first three categories, guaranteeing the ‘greatest degree of equal subjective freedoms’, ‘the status of membership in a voluntary association’, and actionability of law and individual legal protection, are all prescribed by Habermas. On this he is unequivocal. ‘The theorist tells the citizens which rights they must mutually recognize if they want to legitimately regulate their cohabitation with the means of positive law’.51 They have no choice in this. Habermas’s modesty as a theorist means that he expresses these rights only in abstract form. It is up to the legislator to specify the details, but here the legislator must ‘orient himself’ to these rights. The
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fourth category, covering political participation and legislation, is different. Here, Habermas calls for a change of perspective. The citizens alone can decide. He defends this difference by claiming that the first three categories are conditions of political autonomy. They are, therefore, not to be construed as limiting legislative activity, but rather as ‘enabling’ it. But the prescribed categories, which establish the legal form through which the legislator must act, are not to be construed in an instrumental manner. That is, their justification does not lie in the fact that they facilitate popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty and human rights are of co-equal status. The legislator within Habermas’s Rechtsstaat is bound by these initial considerations. Within them decisions are to be distinguished according to the kind of question which is asked and the kinds of reason which can be given in response to different questions. Here Habermas distinguishes three types of question. First, there are pragmatic questions about the appropriate means for achieving given goals. Second, there are ethical-political questions about the identity and forms of life of the community. Third, there are questions of justice, where the relevant question is whether the proposal is ‘equally good for all’.52 Ethical questions seem to be treated more favourably than in The Theory of Communicative Action. Indeed, Habermas objects to proposals to exclude ethical questions from the political agenda. This is unacceptable for thereby political discourse would ‘lose its power for the rational change of pre-political attitudes, interpretations of needs and value orientations’.53 Such exclusion would, moreover, merely favour the existing traditional assumptions.54 But ethical choices are still radically different from moral choices. Moral norms are obligatory, without exception. Proposed norms can either be accepted or rejected. All accepted norms must claim to be valid, irrespective of cultural diversity. Finally, all norms must be consistent with each other. By contrast ethical values have a teleological status. They can be ‘more or less’ accepted. They are valid only for a particular community. Finally ‘different values compete for precedence’.55 The crucial question is ‘What happens when moral norms and ethical values clash?’ For Habermas precedence must always be given to moral norms where these conflict with values. Furthermore, he claims that anyone who wishes to incorporate values as basic rights within the constitution ‘misunderstands its specific legal character; as legal norms, basic rights are formed, like moral rules, according to the model of obligatory action norms – and not according to the model of attractive goods’.56 The combined stress on institutionalized human rights and popular
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sovereignty does not exhaust Habermas’s attempt to link justification of the Rechtsstaat with justification of radical democracy. What he understands by the latter emerges when he quotes John Dewey on majority rule. According to Dewey, majority rule, just as majority rule, is as foolish as its critics charge it with being. But it is never merely majority rule . . . The means by which a majority comes to be a majority is the more important thing: antecedent debates, modifications of views to meet the opinions of minorities . . . The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion.57 This is clearly the same demand that was reflected in Habermas’s complaint about the failure to develop ‘institutions of freedom that protect communicatively structured areas of the private and public spheres’. It is here that Habermas sees the prime arena of political practice. This arena or public sphere has several characteristics. First, it has a multiple form. There is not one public sphere but numerous and diverse public spheres. They can take ‘episodic’ form (for example, street meetings), ‘institutionalized’ form (for example, church conferences), or ‘abstract form’ (for example, the mass media).58 Second, public spheres may not aspire to take ‘decisions’. This is hardly surprising, but the way Habermas puts it is unusual. He writes that ‘the uncoupling of communicated meanings from concrete obligations to act . . . unburdens . . . the public from decisions’.59 Underlying this is the notion, central to his discourse theory, that only the better argument should decide the outcome of deliberation. Anything which constrains debate, an obligation to act or a parliamentary guillotine, impairs the rationality of the debate. Third, Habermas describes this arena as constituting a ‘civil society’. But civil society here has nothing to do with Hegel’s ‘system of needs’ or Marx’s political economy. It consists rather of ‘non-state and non-economic’ voluntary associations.60 The dispersal of the public sphere, its principled separation from decision making and its distinction from Hegel’s ‘system of needs’, all point in the same direction – the impotence of political practice. This would, however, be too harsh a judgement. In Faktizität und Geltung Habermas invokes the priority of the Rechtsstaat over the economy and the administration, as well as conceding the public sphere influence if not power.61 It is notable, however, that Habermas devotes more attention to the threat posed by an autonomous administration, and to ways of
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controlling it, than he does to the autonomy of the market. True, he does emphasize that negotiations between economic actors should issue in ‘fair compromises’, and suggests rules for what counts as fair.62 But the pursuit of economic interest remains something of a black hole. Interests of this kind pose a threat to Habermas’s legal and democratic state because they mobilize power to influence debate where only the better argument should prevail. There is also a broader underlying problem. Habermas associates the ‘utility calculating’ actor with the ‘arbitrarily deciding’ actor.63 Economic interests are tinged with inconstancy, irrationality and the assertion of power.64 Hence the difficulty of reconciling them with political practice as deliberative politics. Towards the end of Faktizität und Geltung he points to another threat. The state, he notes, is increasingly forced to deal with the ‘risks’ that arise from areas like atomic energy and genetic techniques. In doing so it is reliant upon ‘the analytic and prognostic abilities of experts’.65 He goes so far as to speculate that whereas the prime resource of social state was money, the prime resource of the preventative state will be the ‘information and knowledge of experts’.66 That would accentuate a problem he notes earlier. The public sphere is composed of laymen, not experts. Debate within it is conducted at the level of everyday language. That is important for it guarantees the ability of all to participate. The danger is clear. The need for specialized expertise could turn into a justification of technocratic paternalism. Yet this need not be so long as ‘initiatives [that is, grass roots movements] from civil society’ can acquire ‘sufficient expert knowledge and appropriate, if necessary multistage, translations’.67 Compared with his early reflections in Theory and Praxis Habermas’s recent work reflects a scaled down vision. Practice as liberation is off the agenda. But has anything of the ancient conception of political practice survived? In one sense the answer is yes. Theory, with some exceptions, cannot prescribe the outcome of practice. This is as true of moral discourse which issues in norms which claim universal validity as it is of ethical discourse which issues in values specific to particular communities. This is related to another strong continuity, which it has not been possible to discuss above, namely that it is speech which lifts us out of nature. In another sense the answer is no. Habermas is clearly hostile to neo-Aristotelianism. But his hostility needs some qualification. In the context of his comments on neo-Aristotelianism, he simply denies that the good life, that is a life which is good for all of us, can be identified. Here he stresses the plurality of conceptions of the good life. There is even a somewhat stronger version of this argument. In that
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version the dependency of a choice of life form upon one’s own biography is emphasized. The good life here comes close to being an inescapable product of socialization. There is also a weaker version. Here, the good life is a legitimate pursuit of specific communities but it is subordinate to considerations of justice. It is his conception of the latter that fully distinguishes Habermas’s position. It is the moral norms that claim universal validity which are distinct. There are, of course, other important distinctions. The threat to political practice posed by autonomous sub-systems, markets and administrative apparatuses, is one. The other is the limitations Habermas imposes upon the public sphere, the separation from decision making and from the ‘system of needs. Those limits were imposed for the sake of deliberative politics. The question is, whether Habermas has paid too high a price for the purity of deliberative politics.
Notes 1. Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory (New York, Seabury, 1972) p. 209. 2. See, for example, the interview, ‘Critical Theory and Frankfurt University’, in Peter Dews (ed.), Autonomy and Solidarity (London, Verso, 1992) pp. 211–22. 3. On this see Rolf, Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule (Munich, DTV, 1988) pp. 727–8. 4. Robert C. Holub, Jürgen Habermas. Critic in the Public Sphere (London, Routledge, 1991) p. xii. 5. ‘Habermas Talking: An Interview’, Theory and Society 1/1, 1974, 54. 6. On Horkheimer see Peter M. R. Stirk, Max Horkheimer (London, Pinter, 1992). 7. See William Outhwaite, Habermas. A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, Polity, 1994), David Ingram, Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1987), Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (London, Hutchinson, 1978). 8. Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice (London, Heinemann, 1974) p. 41. 9. Ibid. p. 43. Translation modified. See Jürgen Habermas, Theorie und Praxis (Neuwied, Luchterhand, 1963) p. 15. 10. Habermas, Theory and Practice (note 8) p. 61. 11. Ibid. p. 79. 12. Ibid. p. 253. 13. Ibid. p. 264. 14. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Knowledge and Human Interests: A General Perspective’, in Knowledge and Human Interests (London, Heinemann, 1972) p. 316. This is the 1965 lecture included as an Appendix to the book of the same title first published in 1968. 15. Habermas, Theory and Practice (note 8) p. 32. This is from the ‘Introduction’ first published in 1971. 16. Ibid. p. 39. 17. Ibid. pp. 32–7.
114 Peter M. R. Stirk 18. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (note 14) p. 196. See also his observation on technical interests: ‘The interest . . . when realized, leads not to happiness but to success’. p. 134. 19. See Stephen Eric Bronner, Of Critical Theory and its Theorists (Oxford, Blackwell, 1994) p. 290. See also Habermas’s reformulation in The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1 (London, Heinemann, 1984) pp. 87. 20. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (note 14) p. 176. 21. Ibid. pp. 288–9. 22. Jürgen Habermas, ‘A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 3/2, 1973, 182. 23. Ibid. p. 183. 24. Thus, ‘reconstructions explicate correct know-how . . . without invoking practical consequences’. Ibid. 25. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Toward a Reconstruction of Historial Materialism’, in Communication and the Evolution of Society (London, Heinemann, 1979) p. 130. 26. Ibid. p. 140. 27. Habermas, ‘A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests’ (note 22) p. 183. 28. Jürgen Habermas. ‘History and Evolution’, Telos 39, 1979, 5–44. 29. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (note 19) p. 341. 30. Ibid. p. 99. 31. Ibid. pp. 188–9. 32. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, Polity, 1987) p. 95. 33. H. J. Paton (ed.), The Moral Law (London, Hutchinson, 1948) p. 84. 34. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (note 19) p. 191. 35. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (note 32) p. 233. 36. Ibid. p. 109. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. p. 110. 39. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (note 19) p. 89. 40. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (note 32) p. 116. See also Vol. 1 (note 19) p. 172. 41. Ibid. p. 35. 42. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (note 32) p. 117. 43. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (note 19) p. 341–2. 44. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (note 32) pp. 268–9. 45. Ibid. p. 328. 46. Ibid. p. 355. 47. Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application (Cambridge, Polity, 1993) pp. 123–5. 48. Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking (Cambridge, Polity, 1992) p. 49. The primacy of practice over reason involved an inversion of the ancient schema in so far as the bios theoretikos was elevated above other forms of life, p. 32. 49. See his coments on Castoriadis in Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1985) pp. 380–88. 50. Jürgan Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung. Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts
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51. 52. 53.
54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.
64.
65. 66. 67.
und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1992) p. 129. Ibid. p. 160. Ibid. p. 200. Ibid. p. 375. Although Habermas refers to rational change here he still insists there are no rational grounds for ordering values. The rank ordering of values occurs ‘arbitrarily or without reflection according to customary standards and rank orders’. pp. 315–16. Ibid. p. 376. Ibid. p. 311. Ibid. p. 312. Quoted in Ibid. p. 369. Ibid. p. 452. Ibid. p. 437. Ibid. p. 443. Ibid. pp. 60, 105–6. Ibid. pp. 204–5. Ibid. p. 154. See also A. J. Vetlesen, ‘Hannah Arendt, Habermas and the Republican Tradition’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 21/1, 1995, 13, Bronner, Of Critical Theory and its Theorists (note 19) pp. 297, 303, 306. Although Habermas obviously continues to hold that there are ‘generalizable’ interests their extent appears to be severely limited. He frequently associates ‘interest oriented’ action with a ‘balance of interests or compromise’. Faktizität und Geltung (note 50) pp. 174–5. It is also notable that he has moved away from the idea of a ‘repressed generalizable interest’ which he deployed in Legitimation Crisis (London, Heinemann, 1976); ‘Interview mit T. Hviid Nielsen’, in Die nachholende Revolution (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1990) p. 115. Faktizität und Geltung (note 50) p. 522. Ibid. p. 525. Ibid. p. 451.
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Part 2 Marxism and the State
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6 Recent Developments in State Theory: Approaches, Issues, Agendas Bob Jessop1
Marxists led the postwar revival of interest in theorizing the state during the mid-1960s. From their general concern with the form and functions of the capitalist state in Western Europe and North America, state theory then adopted a more institutionalist focus in the late 1970s movement to ‘bring the state back in’.2 Interest in state theory diminished during the 1980s, however, and the more innovative theoretical critiques of the state – Foucauldian, feminist and discourse-analytic approaches – are neither Marxist nor even overtly focused on the state. None the less there are some interesting parallels between these different waves of theorizing. My aim is to explore these and their implications for future theoretical work on states and state power – especially in the light of contemporary changes therein.
The Marxist legacy Marx and Engels left no adequate theory of the state, only a loose and irreconcilable series of philosophical, theoretical, journalistic, partisan, ad hominem, or purely ad hoc comments. Subsequently, the Second International and the Comintern developed one-sided instrumentalist or epiphenomenalist accounts of the state based on selective interpretations of accessible basic writings of Marx and Engels. The Second International supported a parliamentary democratic road to socialism, facilitated by state planning, centralization and control of economic and political power in a steadily emerging organized capitalism, in order to manage the changing balance of political forces and overcome the various crisis tendencies of capitalism. And the Comintern proposed a ‘Marxist-Leninist’ analysis according to which monopoly capital and the state had fused into a single mechanism of exploitation and 119
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domination. It argued for the forcible replacement of bourgeois democracy by a soviet system based on workers’ councils, a form of direct democracy juxtaposed uneasily with a central role for the vanguard Communist Party that would lead the revolution and establish the new system. Paradoxically, the latter itself quickly degenerated from revolutionary socialism into a system based on a rather different mode of fusing economic exploitation and political oppression – and criticized by some Trotskyist groups as (a variant form of) state capitalism. The interwar period was also characterized by the interest of first generation Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School in the trend towards a strong, bureaucratic state – authoritarian or totalitarian.3 This trend reflected the development of organized capitalism, an ideologically powerful mass media, and, as a third pillar of class rule, incorporationist or repressive strategies for diminishing trade union power. The revival of Marxist interest in the state in the late 1960s and 1970s was a response to the apparent success of the Keynesian welfare national state in managing postwar capitalism – Atlantic Fordism – and involved reaffirming the essentially capitalist character of this state form. It initially sought to derive the necessary form and functions of the capitalist state from the basic categories of Marx’s critique of political economy and to show that contemporary states could not suspend the associated contradictions and crisis-tendencies of capitalism. By the late 1970s, however, this ‘capital logic’ approach had imploded under the weight of its many competing theoretical starting points and its highly abstract and essentialist mode of theorizing, which disregarded the historical variability of capitalism and its political regimes. Two key and convergent insights survived these weaknesses. First, Marxist theory moved from a relatively simple and determinist derivation according to which form followed function, typified in claims that the state had to be relatively autonomous in order to serve the interests of capital, to a recognition that its very form as an autonomous power inhibited such functions. The state was no longer seen as an ideal collective capitalist able to pursue the real interests of capital in general against the particular or perceived interests of individual capitals.4 Instead state forms were held to problematize the state’s overall functionality for accumulation and political class domination and, indeed, to promote dysfunction. For the necessary institutional separation of state and market in capitalist societies generated different (and potentially contradictory) political and economic logics.5 The operational autonomy of the state prevented any guarantee that political outcomes would serve the needs of capital – a conclusion that fuelled
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analyses of the structural contradictions, strategic dilemmas, and pathdependent (that is, historically conditioned) development of specific state forms. Second, Marxist theorists abandoned simple, unitary views of the state apparatus as a neutral instrument of class domination or as a structural ensemble that somehow guaranteed capitalist interests regardless of the forces controlling it. Instead they began to analyse state power as a complex social relation. This involved studies of different states’ structurally-inscribed strategic selectivity and of the factors shaping their strategic capacities. Attention turned to the state as an ensemble of institutions with specific, differential impacts on political forces’ ability to pursue their own interests and strategies in and through access to and control over given state capacities.6 They emphasized the variability of these capacities, their organization, and exercise; and they stressed the relational nature of states’ capacities to project their power into social realms beyond their own institutional boundaries. As with the first set of insights, this approach also led to more complex studies of struggles, institutions, and political capacities. Gramsci’s writings, though penned in the interwar years, became influential only during the postwar revival of Marxist state theory. Indeed they still enjoyed critical acclaim in the 1990s. Gramsci studied the concrete modalities of state power rather than abstractly theorizing the capitalist state in general. He investigated the ‘state in its inclusive sense’ (that is, ‘political society + civil society’), showing how state power in bourgeois democratic societies rested on ‘hegemony armoured by coercion’.7 Rather than treating specific institutions and apparatuses as technical instruments of government, Gramsci studied their social bases and stressed how their functions and effects are shaped by links to the economy and civil society. Together with its incomplete, tentative, and polyvalent character, this makes his approach compatible with several contemporary theoretical currents – discourse theory, feminism, Foucauldian analyses, and postmodernism8 – and has helped to maintain the vitality of the Gramscian tradition. The regulation approach to political economy is a less direct but significant source of Marxist state theory that became prominent in the 1980s and should be considered part of the second postwar wave of state theory. Regulationists argue that capitalist economies are necessarily socially embedded and regularized and that states have a key role in governing key economic and extra-economic aspects of accumulation. This opened the way for more complex and concrete analyses of how political regimes shape, sustain, and undermine specific accumulation
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regimes and modes of growth. This is one of the main themes of second and third generation regulation theory.9
The second wave The neo-statist movement, which sought to ‘bring the state back in’ as a critical explanatory variable in social analysis, was a decisive factor in the second revival of interest in the state. Although challenged by the continuing influence of Gramsci and the variable impact of other neoMarxist currents, the most serious competition for neo-statism came from three other approaches.10 These have contributed to a less evident but none the less real third wave of theorizing. Thus Foucault and his followers focused on the disciplinary organization of society, the microphysics of power, and changing forms of governmentality, all of which ran counter to neo-statism in tending to remove once again the state from theoretical view. A broad-based feminist critique of malestream state theory has questioned the need for a theory of the state at all. And discourse analyses consider how specific discourses and practices constitute, deconstruct and reconstruct the state and its place within social relations. Demands to ‘bring the state back’ criticised extant theories as too ‘society-centred’ because the latter allegedly tried to explain the form, functions, and impact of the state in terms of the organization, needs, or interests of society. This laid Marxist accounts open to charges of economic reductionism in their emphasis on base-superstructure relations and class struggles. Pluralist accounts were likewise charged with limiting their analyses to competition for state power by interest groups and movements rooted in civil society, ignoring the distinctive role and interests of state managers. Structural-functionalists were criticized for assuming that the development and operations of the state or political system were determined by the functional requirements of society as a whole. ‘State-centred’ theorists argued that state activities and impacts were easily explained in terms of their own distinctive properties as administrative or repressive organs and/or the equally distinctive properties of the broader political system. Societal factors were secondary and their impact was always filtered through the political system and the state itself. Thus neo-statists advocated a programmatic return to the classic state theory found in Machiavelli, Clausewitz, de Tocqueville, Weber, and Hintze. Their lack of real interest or familiarity with such thinkers (with the principal but still partial exception Weber) suggests, however,
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that these figures were cited to legitimate neo-statism by linking it to a long tradition of state-centred thought.11 In practice state-centred work involves detailed case studies of state building, policy-making, and implementation. In this latter context six themes have been emphasized: • The geo-political position of modern states within the international system of nation-states; • The dynamic of military organization and the impact of warfare on state development; • The distinctive administrative powers and strategic reach of the modern state to produce and enforce collectively binding decisions within a centrally organized, territorially bounded society and to intervene in different social sub-systems (including the economy), organizations (including capitalist enterprises), and forces (including classes); • The state’s ‘Tocquevillean’ role in shaping institutions, group formation, interest articulation, political capacities, ideas, and demands beyond the state; • The distinctive pathologies of government and the political system, such as bureaucratism, political corruption, government overload, or state failure; • The distinctive interests and capacities of ‘state managers’ (career officials, elected politicians, etc.). ‘State-centred’ theorists identify distinctive political pressures and processes that shape the state’s form and functions, emphasize the state’s autonomy from pressures and forces emerging from the wider economy and society, and accord it a unique and irreplaceable centrality in national life and international relations.12 They reject Marxist class- or capital-theoretical accounts that locate state autonomy within the parameters of the long-term, collective interests of capital; and argue instead that the state exercises autonomy in its own right and in pursuit of its own distinctive interests. State managers exercise power through the state’s ‘infrastructural’ power, that is, its capacities to penetrate, control, supervise, police, and discipline modern societies independently of, or against resistance from, non-state forces,13 as well as through more orthodox forms of ‘despotic power’. Autonomy is not a fixed structural feature of each and every governmental system, but differs across states, by policy area, and over time. It is constrained by the external limits to autonomous state action and variations in the
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capacity and readiness of state managers to pursue strategies independently of non-state actors. One variant of state-centred theorizing is war-centred state theory, which reinstates the military dimension to state theory, attributing its neglect to Marxists’ exaggerated interest in class struggle and sociologists’ false belief in the inherently pacific logic of industrialism. It claims that war has decisively shaped the present century and has repercussions throughout state and society and that states continually improve their military, security and surveillance capacities to defend their territorial integrity and social cohesion.14 War-centred theorists regard the state primarily as the bearer of military power within a world of other nation states rather than as a political community within which citizenship rights may be realized.15 They argue that wars make states and states make wars. For, not only are states forged in the heat of war (either in victory or defeat), but war-making is also critical to state formation, witness its role in political centralization or the rise of modern fiscal systems. Thus key elements of state form and functions stem from concerns with external defence and internal pacification.16 Five main lines of criticism have been advanced against neo-statism.17 First, the approach is hardly novel and its core themes are found in socalled ‘society-centred’ approaches.18 Second, it focuses one-sidedly on state and party politics at the expense of political forces outside and beyond the state, substituting ‘politicians for social formations (such as class or gender or race), elite for mass politics, political conflict for social struggle’.19 Third, not only are there empirical inadequacies in several key statist studies but neo-statists also seek credence by providing incomplete and misleading accounts of other studies.20 Fourth, benign neo-statist characterizations of politically autonomous state managers as effective agents of economic modernization and social reform are politically prejudiced – especially as there are no neo-statist case studies that reveal the harmful effects of authoritarian or autocratic rule.21 Finally, neo-statism rests on the fundamental theoretical fallacy of clear and unambiguously bounded, mutually exclusive and selfdetermining domains of state (political system, managers, apparatus and power) and society (social interests forces and powers) such that these domains can be studied in isolation and the findings aggregated to provide a complete account. This reifies and renders absolute what are really emergent, partial, unstable, and variable distinctions. It rules out hybrid logics such as corporatism or policy networks, divisions among state managers due to ties between state organs and other social
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spheres, and other forms of overlap between state and society.22 This fallacy invalidates the proposal that state-centred and society-centred should be combined to produce rounded explanations23 as well as the more extreme claim that the state apparatus should be treated as the principal independent variable in explaining political and social events. This final criticism does not require rejection of all state theorizing. Mitchell concludes his own critique of neo-statism with a plea to study ‘the detailed processes of spatial organization, temporal arrangement, functional specification, and supervision and surveillance, which create the appearance of a world fundamentally divided into state and society’.24 He adds that this division is conceptually prior to any influence of state on society or vice versa, and is produced in and through practices on both sides of the state-society divide.25 This crucial point will contribute to my conclusions and also provides an appropriate bridge to Foucault’s work. Foucault linked his historical investigations into power, knowledge, and discipline to a sustained theoretical assault on liberal and Marxist views of sovereignty, law, and the state. He criticized all attempts to build state theory on three broad grounds. First, state theory is essentialist. It explains the nature of the state and state power through inherent, pre-given properties, instead of explaining state development and functions as the contingent outcomes of specific practices not necessarily (if at all) located within, nor openly oriented to, the state itself. Second, state theory retains medieval notions of a centralized, monarchical sovereignty and/or a unified, juridico-political power, whereas a multiplicity of institutions and practices are involved in the exercise of dispersed and fragmentary forms of state power, some of which are extra-juridical in nature. Finally, state theorists focus on ‘top-down’ macro-political strategies for domination, emanating from a sovereign political and legal state power at the centre that reaches into society and reliant on discourses of legitimation. In contrast, Foucault advocated a ‘bottom-up’ micro-physics of power concerned with actual practices of subjugation and diffuse forms of power relations in the many and varied local and regional sites where the identity and conduct of social agents were actually determined. State power is reconceived as the provisional, emergent result of the complex strategic interplay of diverse social forces within and beyond the state. It is dispersed, involves the active mobilization of individuals and not just their passive targeting, and can be colonized and articulated into quite different discourses, strategies, and institutions. Power is not concentrated in the state: it is ubiquitous, immanent in every social relation.26
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Contrary to many other post-structuralist thinkers, however, Foucault did not entirely reject analyses of the macro-physics of state power.27 For his later work focused on the state as the site of statecraft and governmental rationality rather than as the sovereign power described in juridical-political discourse. He studied how different political regimes emerged through shifts in ‘governmentality’, the skilled discursive practice – or art of government – in which state capacities were used reflexively and prudently in monitoring and constructing conformity to specific state projects. At the origins of Foucault’s state was raison d’état, an autonomous political rationality, distinct from religion and morality.28 This was linked to different political projects, such as the ‘police state’ (Polizeistaat), social government, or welfarism. In and through these governmental rationalities or state projects, local or regional sites of power were colonized, articulated into ever more general mechanisms and forms of domination, and then maintained by the entire state system. Foucault also advocated studies of the connections among these forms of micro-power and their mechanisms for producing knowledge – whether for surveillance, the formation and accumulation of knowledge about individuals, or their constitution as specific types of subject. Foucault’s work has inspired studies focused on specific policies or policy apparatuses and/or specific political discourses and strategies, though some try to develop a more general account of the state.29 Giddens treats surveillance, with industrialism, militarism and capitalism, as the four key institutional clusterings in modern societies that intersect the nation-state. Developments in surveillance enhance the state’s capacities for internal pacification and external military operations. The main means of state control and punishment are policing, codified law, and imprisonment; these are linked in turn to the dominance of exchange relations in production, civilian control of the military, and extended citizenship. An interesting consequence of these changes is that the modern state actually resorts less often to violence to control the populace: surveillance and disciplinary normalization do much of the work of regularizing activities in time and space.30 Dandeker takes these ideas further in a recent study that offers a typology of states based on surveillance mechanisms and the interests they serve.31 Assessing Foucault’s oeuvre is complicated as he never codified his work and his views tended to change with each monograph. His focus shifted from attacks on orthodox views of the state and power relations to a concern with the role of political discourses and statecraft in the
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emergence and transformation of the modern state. But his ideas on the ubiquity of power relations, the coupling of power-knowledge, and governmentality are important theoretical and empirical correctives to the more one-sided and/or essentialist analyses of Marxist state theory and to neo-statist assumptions about the state. More critically, however, Foucault tended to reduce power to a universal technique (whether panoptic surveillance or disciplinary normalization) and to ignore how class and patriarchal relations shape both the state and the general exercise of power. He neglected the continued importance of law, constitutionalized violence, and bureaucracy in the workings of the modern state.32 He also provided little account of the bases of resistance (bar an alleged plebeian spirit of revolt). While Foucault himself did later re-examine the state and statecraft, Foucauldian studies still tend to ignore the complex strategic and structural character of the state, neglecting institutional and organizational factors that lie beyond the typical concepts and assumptions of Foucauldianism.
Feminist state theory While feminists have certainly elaborated many powerful feminist critiques of political (as opposed to state) theory and particular, genderrelevant aspects of the operation and impact of states, their ideas on the general nature and form of the state have often been imported from outside.33 This observation is not intended to belittle their early work, but to highlight the difficulties involved in developing distinctively feminist accounts of the general form and functions of the state. Not all feminists would agree the need for such a theory – either intellectually or politically. Allen has argued that feminists should concentrate on feminist theoretical and political agendas and should reject existing state theories ‘with [their] definitions, parameters and analytic tasks forged for political positions other than feminism’.34 In this context she calls on feminists to focus on categories such as policing, law, medical culture, bureaucratic culture, organized crime, fraternalism, paternalism, misogyny, subjectivity, the body, sexuality, men, masculinity, violence, power, pleasure, and so forth, which bear directly on feminist political concerns.35 Similarly, MacKinnon36 rejects the malign ‘malestream’ or phallocratic character of state theories and their resulting debilitating impact on feminist thought and mobilization. Conversely, Brown argues that feminists must analyse the state because it is so central to many women’s issues and so many women are state dependants.37 But she rejects attempts to develop a single, all-purpose
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theory in favour of drawing insights from different state theories relevant to the different faces that the state presents to women.38 Postwar feminists first began to tackle the state during the attempted marriage between feminism and Marxism in the 1970s.39 It typically involved attempts to wed theories of reproduction and patriarchy with Marxist analyses of production to show how patriarchy served capitalism. Thus capitalism was said to depend on specific social forms reproducing labour-power and gender relations as well as specific social relations of production.40 The initial dominance of Marxist-feminism was reflected in the fact that efforts to develop feminist state theory often adopted methods of theory construction similar to Marxist theorizing more generally.41 Thus we can distinguish three main ways of linking feminist concerns and the state: the methods of subsumption, derivation, and articulation. Some radical feminist theories simply subsumed, assimilated or identified the gendering mechanisms of each and every state under the overarching category of patriarchal domination: whatever their apparent differences, all states are expressions of patriarchy or phallocracy. Patriarchy is diffused throughout society, with the state one more site of male domination over women; it serves as the ‘patriarch general’, sustains gender inequality, adopts the male viewpoint, and serves and consolidates the interests of men as a sex.42 More complex versions view the state as a specific form of patriarchal or phallocratic domination with its own determinate (and distinctive) effects on gender relations, through its own patriarchal strategic selectivity, capacities, and needs.43 Patriarchy defines the core of the state, however, so these views are still subsumptionist.44 Other feminists derived the necessary form and/or functions of the patriarchal state from the imperatives of reproduction (rather than production), the changing forms of patriarchal domination or the nature of the ‘domestic’ mode of production. This method involves similar problems to the Marxist derivation debate in assuming that form necessarily follows function, thereby denying any real autonomy or contingency to the state. The result varies from a feminist variation on economism to a more elaborate version of subsumptionism.45 Others again analyze the contingent articulation of patriarchal and capitalist forms of domination as crystallized in the state. This third approach shows that patriarchal and gender relations make a difference to the state but it refuses to prejudge the form and effects of this difference. It argues that to acknowledge that ‘gender inequality exists does not automatically imply that every capitalist state is involved in the
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reproduction of that inequality in the same ways or to the same extent’.46 It also identifies the importance of differences among women as well as between gender groups, which is an important corrective to extreme forms of gender essentialism. There is now an extensive literature on the complex and variable forms of articulation of class, gender, and ethnicity in particular state structures and policy areas.47 This ‘intersectional’ approach has been taken further still by third wave feminists and queer theorists, who have emphasized the instability and socially constructed arbitrariness of dominant views of sexual and gender identities and have shown the wide variability of masculine as well as feminine identities and interests.48 Thus there is growing interest in the constitution of competing, inconsistent, and even openly contradictory identities for both males and females, their grounding in discourses about masculinity and/or femininity, their explicit or implicit embedding in different institutions and material practices,49 and their physico-cultural materialization in human bodies. This has created the theoretical space for a recent revival of explicit interest in gender and the state, which has made major contributions across a broad range of issues – including how specific constructions of masculinity and femininity, their associated gender identities, interests, roles, and bodily forms come to be privileged in the state’s own discourses, institutions, and material practices. Such studies rule out any analysis of the state as a simple expression of patriarchal domination and could also be said to cast doubt on the very utility of ‘patriarchy’ as an analytical category. At the same time the best feminist scholarship on state theory casts doubt on key assumptions of much ‘malestream’ work. First, it attacks the conventional view that the modern state claims a legitimate monopoly over the means of coercion, because men can perpetrate violence (even murder) against women within the confines of the family and oppress women in public spaces through the reality, threat or fear of rape. This suggests that the conventional view relates to the separation of coercion from the organization of production and the centralization of publicly organized power (exploitation takes the form of exchange, dictatorship takes the form of democracy).50 It omits the exercise of parental or patriarchal coercion in the family over women and children. Further, the rational-legal legitimacy of state coercion can be theorized as the public form assumed by masculine violence, used to support its private expression within the family and civil society. Such arguments have been taken further in recent work on different forms of masculinity and the state.51
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Second, feminist theorizing has criticized the juridical distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’. Not only does it obfuscate class relations (as Marxists have argued), it also hides a key mechanism of male domination and is therefore inherently political in itself. Feminists reinterpret Marxist analyses of the split between public citizen and private individual, characterized as grounded in the rise of the liberal bourgeois state capitalism, as the product of the patriarchal ordering of the bourgeois state.52 They equate the public sphere as both state and civil society, subsuming the Marxist ‘private’ sphere of private property, exchange, and individual rights, and define the private sphere with the domestic sphere and women’s alleged place in the ‘natural’ order of reproduction. They identify gender differentials across both spheres; for, historically, women have been excluded from the public sphere and subordinated to men in the private. Yet men’s independence both as citizens and as workers is premised on women’s role in caring for them at home.53 Even where women have won full citizenship rights, their continuing oppression and subjugation in the private sphere hinders exercise and enjoyment of these rights.54 The organization of the ‘private’ sphere itself has major implications for the strategic selectivity of the state. Third, they stress the links between warfare, masculinity, and the state. In general terms, as Connell notes, ‘the state arms men and disarms women’.55 At its most extreme, this criticism involves concepts such as the ‘sado-state’, where the military apparatus is a simple expression of male aggression and destructiveness, or militarism and imperialism are expressions of a cult of violent masculinity.56 This is reflected in Lloyd’s more modest claim that ‘the masculinity of citizenship and the masculinity of war have been conceptually connected in Western thought’.57 Other nuanced historical accounts have also shown how state legitimacy is structured in terms of masculinity. The modern state rests on ideas of rationality, calculation, orderliness, hierarchy, and informal masculine codes and networks.58 Non-feminists could dismiss feminist work on the state as wholly irrelevant, accept it as a more or less important supplement to the core contributions of some other account or welcome it as a fundamental challenge to the received wisdom. The first position is untenable because, as the second view suggests, feminist research identifies key aspects of the state’s form and functions that have been marginalized or missed by other theories and also provides new examples of how form problematizes function and creates specific contradictions, dilemmas, and conflicts. These insights affect conventional Marxist and
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neo-statist approaches as well as international relations theory and Foucauldian analyses.59 Moreover, in line with the third view, some feminist research has revealed basic flaws in much malestream theorizing, requiring that any adequate account of the strategic complexity of the state include feminist insights into how specific constructions of masculinity and feminity, their associated gender identities, interests, roles, and bodily forms come to be privileged in the state’s own discourses, institutions, and material practices and what this implies for the gendered nature of the state’s structural selectivity, capacities for action and role in reproducing specific patterns of gender relations.60
Discourse-analysis and stateless state theory Discourse-analytic studies begin from the position that the state does not exist, but is the illusory product of the political imaginary.61 The state appears on the political scene because political forces orient their actions towards the ‘state’, acting as if it existed and so giving it the appearance of solidity. Because there is no common discourse of the state (at most there is a dominant or hegemonic discourse) and different political forces orient their action at different times to different ideas of the state, the state is at best a polyvalent, polycontextual phenomenon. It changes shape and appearance with the political forces acting towards it and the circumstances in which they do so. This analysis has been advanced from various theoretical or analytical viewpoints. Four examples will suffice. First, Abrams noted that all attempts to define the state as a distinct material entity, agent, function, or political relation create difficulties; he recommended abandoning the state as a material object of study.62 For the institutional ensemble that comprises government can be studied without resorting to the concept of the state; and the ‘idea of the state’ can be studied in turn as the distinctive collective (mis-) representation of capitalist societies that masks the true nature of political practice. Political systems theorists have often condemned the conceptual morass and vapid debates that accompany state theorizing, but Abrams’s position is both more positive and more negative because he sees a constitutive role for the ‘state idea’ in both shaping and disguising political domination.63 It calls for a historical analysis of the ‘cultural revolution’ (or ideological shifts) involved when state systems are transformed.64 Second, Melossi urges a ‘stateless theory of the state’, recognizing that the state is just a juridical concept, an idea that enables people to ‘do’
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the state, to furnish themselves and others with reasons and grounds for their own actions.65 It can be used reflexively by many different types of official to provide a vocabulary of motives for their (in)actions and to account for the state’s unity in a divided and unequal civil society. This implies that state autonomy is not a reified property of a reified state but varies with the degree of autonomy which governmental elites believe they enjoy at specific places and times.66 Third, discourse-analytical approaches show increasing interest in specific narrative, rhetorical, or argumentative features of state power. This is reflected in case studies that suggest that state policies do not objectively represent interests or problems located in or beyond the state, but are discursively-mediated, if not wholly discursivelyconstituted, products of struggles to define and narrate ‘problems’ that can be dealt with in and through state action. In this sense the effectivity of policy-making is closely tied to its rhetorical and argumentative framing and how it is perceived.67 This approach is also evident in important contributions from within ‘critical geopolitics’ regarding key international dimensions of state – especially discourses of sovereignty, the changing nature of ‘security’ and threats thereto, and the remaking of the territorial boundaries of states.68 Fourth, autopoietic theorists argue that the ‘state’ is simply a selfdescription or internal model of the political system.69 The key feature of autopoietic systems is their radical operational autonomy, which derives from their power to determine their own operational codes and programmes and to reproduce (or transform) themselves despite attempts at control from outside and/or other perturbing influences in their environment. These systems include the modern economy as a self-organizing system of payments, the legal system (as a selfcontained, self-modifying system of legally binding legal decisions) and the political system (as a circuit of power passing between governors and governed and producing decisions binding on all participants). The polity is seen as one system among others in a polycentric, essentially anarchic society. Since power continually circulates through the political system, one must not reify the state by treating it as a distinct entity with its own power and resources or accord it the superordinate role it enjoyed in early modern political theory. The state is best understood as the means through which political forces use the polarity of government versus opposition to simplify strategies and policy choices and thereby enable society (and its subsystems) to be supplied with legitimate and binding decisions about collective goods. These include internal and external security (with the infrastructural power to secure
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this collective good being based on organized violence); economic and social security (with a key role for government-controlled fiscal and financial resources); and, most recently, technological and ecological security (where infrastructural capacities are based on collectively organized knowledge). Each of these forms of security corresponds to distinctive political projects and forms of intervention. Thus the contemporary polity is concerned with how best to ‘guide’ other functional systems without attempting direct (and necessarily fruitless) intervention into their operations. This is arguably best achieved by defining the parameters within which they operate, generating knowledge about the unintended external consequences of their activities, and seeking to build consensus on social projects.70 All four approaches reject the reification of the state but also attempt to show how the ‘idea of the state’ and its associated narrative and rhetorical practices aid the operation of the political system and/or wider society. Thus, whether this idea is treated as a mystification, selfmotivation, pure narrativity, or self-description, discourses about the state have a vital role in constituting the state as a complex ensemble of political relations linked to society as a whole. This approach contrasts markedly with the reification of the state-society distinction in neo-statism. It also offers a different slant on the Foucauldian rejection of orthodox accounts of the state by highlighting the functions of these accounts in the political system. And, in the case of autopoietic theorizing, it gives additional, systems-theoretical reasons for disputing that the modern state as a superordinate, sovereign authority standing above and outside society.
New directions of research Despite declining interest in the more esoteric and abstract modes of theorizing the state, substantive research on states and state power has enjoyed an explosive growth in recent years. It is impossible to review even a small fraction of the resulting literature, but it is worth mentioning five major themes that facilitate confrontation between the above-mentioned approaches. These are the historical variability of statehood (or stateness); the relative strength or weakness of states; the future of the national state in an alleged era of globalization and regionalization; issues of scale, space, territoriality, and the state; and the rise of governance mechanisms and their articulation with government. All of these themes involve shifts from the abstract theorizing that marked the initial postwar rediscovery of the state and pose the sort
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of theoretical and empirical problems that only well-developed and sophisticated theoretical frameworks could hope to decipher. First, interest in stateness has been prompted both by growing disquiet about the abstract character of much state theory (especially its assumption of a ubiquitous, unified, sovereign state) and by an increasing interest in the historical variability of actual states. This has led some theorists to focus on the state as a conceptual variable and to examine the varied presence of the idea of the state.71 Thus Badie and Birnbaum among others have examined the state’s differential presence as a distinctive political form, usefully distinguishing between the political centre required in any complex social division of labour and the state as but one possible institutional locus of this centre.72 For them, the defining features of the state are its structural differentiation, autonomy, universalism, and institutional solidity. They see France as having the archetypal state in a centralized society; Britain has a political centre but no state; Germany has a state but no centre; and the Helvetian Confederation (Switzerland) has no state and no centre. Such approaches are important because they historicize the state idea and stress the variety of its institutional forms. A growing number of studies have explored these issues on all territorial scales from the local to the international, with considerable concern for meso-level variation. Second, interest in strong and weak states concerns the factors that make for state strength, interpreted internally as a state’s capacities to exercise authority over society, and externally as its power in the international community of states.73 This concern is often linked with interest in the state’s capacity to penetrate and organize the rest of society and is very marked in recent theoretical and empirical work on predatory and/or developmental states. The predatory state is essentially parasitic upon its economy and civil society, with a significant measure of despotic power, whereas the developmental state enjoys a balance of despotic power and infrastructural power, wielding it in marketconforming ways to develop economy and civil society.74 The coherence of this approach is itself weakened, however, by the blanket contrast between strong and weak states and by inconsistent interpretations of strength and weakness. It also runs the risk of tautology when strength is defined purely in terms of outcomes.75 A possible solution is to allow for more variability in state capacities by policy area, over time specific conjunctures – a ‘strategic-relational’ approach (see below). Third, recent work on globalization has questioned the future of the national state. This work builds on earlier debates on the internationalization of finance and the activities of multinational firms. It has
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become more pressing, however, with the emergence of the triadic economic blocs (North America, Europe, and East Asia), development of cross-border regional cooperation, and the re-emergence or re-discovery of cities, regions, and industrial districts as major bases of (international) competitiveness. Fourth, and closely linked to the previous issue, is the changing scale of politics. While some theorists see the crisis of the national state as displacing the primary scale of political organization and action to either the global or the regional scale, others suggest that there has been a relativization of scale. Thus, whereas the national state provided the primary scale of political organization in the economic space and period of Atlantic Fordism, the current after-Fordist period involves a marked dispersion of political and policy issues across different scales of organization, with none of them obviously primary. This in turn poses particularly difficult problems about securing the coherence of action across different scales.76 Finally, if the period of Atlantic Fordism was dominated by concerns about the relationship between state and market, the current research agenda is much concerned with ‘governance’. This concerns forms of self-organized co-ordination or concertation reliant neither on governmental hierarchies nor on the anarchy of the market. Governance is emerging on different scales of organization, ranging from expansion of international and supra-national regimes through national and regional public-private partnerships to more localized networks of power and decision making. It is often taken to imply a diminution in state capacities, but has also been seen as enhancing its power to secure its interests and, indeed, as providing states with a new (or expanded) role in the meta-governance (or overall coordination) of different governance regimes and mechanisms.77
An emerging agenda? Though more diverse than the Marxist state debate of the 1970s, the currents reviewed above have followed a similar learning curve. The Marxist debate originated in a critique of social democratic and/or pluralist accounts of the state and was initially concerned to show why the state in a capitalist society was necessarily a capitalist state. It was later forced into a growing recognition of the contingency of state forms and regimes and the variation in state capacities and performance. This prompted the abandonment of highly abstract theorizing with its premature closure of many issues and shifted attention to more concrete, institutional levels. This emphasis on contingency catalysed
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the development of the two insights noted in section one: that form problematizes function and that the state is an institutional ensemble that has variable structural selectivity and strategic capacities. Other currents discussed here have encountered similar problems, most notably feminist state theories. These have also shown increasing interest in what one can call the strategically selective gendering of the state and its structural coupling with other institutional orders in society. Likewise, despite its disposition to reify the state-society distinction, state-centred theorizing has always emphasized the difference that specific regimes make to the nature and impact of the political process. Foucauldian analyses have always shown less interest in more abstract structural properties of the state, but they have been very sensitive to the constitutive role of political practices and statecraft in shaping regimes and their governmental capacities. Autopoietic theory has recently moved from reducing the state to a self-description of the political system to stressing the variability of its infrastructural capacities, the problematic relationship between its radical operational autonomy and the systematic interdependence of different institutional orders, and the ‘ironic’ role of political discourse in guiding social evolution.78 Conversely, it remains an enduring weakness of purely discourse-analytic research on the state that it lacks the conceptual apparatus to comprehend the state’s structurally-inscribed strategic selectivity or the variability of its capacities and vulnerabilities.79 Thus, despite the obvious differences between these different theoretical approaches, a remarkable convergence has occurred on a small and significant set of themes grounded in the growing recognition of the contingency of the state apparatus and state power.80 In identifying these themes, we can also identify a useful research agenda for a third generation of state theorizing. Noting areas of convergence as well as divergence may serve to highlight critical theoretical issues and research topics that may help to resolve disputes among different approaches. This exercise is not, however, intended to exclude alternative agendas or prejudge the next round of debate. All of these approaches seem to agree in dethroning the state from its superordinate position within society and analysing it simply as one institutional order among others. Marxists no longer treat it as the ideal collective capitalist; neo-statists no longer treat it as a sovereign legal subject; it has been deconstructed by Foucauldians; feminists no longer view it simply as the patriarch general; and discourse analysts and autopoieticists alike see it as constituted, ironically or otherwise, through contingent discursive or communicative practices. In short, the
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state is seen as an emergent, partial, and unstable system that is interdependent with other systems in a complex social order. All of the theoretical schools discussed above are concerned in their different ways to respond to this by providing more concrete, historically specific, institutionally sensitive, and action-oriented research. Such concerns are shaping the growing body of substantive research into stateness and the relative strength (and weakness) of particular political regimes. All of this marks an important general advance on the loose talk which equates the state to a simple thing or subject and/or fails to consider its variability as a complex social relation within (let alone across) given social formations. These trends point towards the state being analysed in a ‘strategicrelational’ context.81 By virtue of its structural selectivity and specific strategic capacities, its powers will always be conditional or relational. Their realization depends on the structural ties between the state and its encompassing political system, the strategic links among state managers and other political forces, and the complex web of interdependencies and social networks linking the state and political system to its broader environment. Neo-statism often proves weak due to its tendency to reify the state-society distinction and discourse-analytic work often misses the deep-rooted, extra-discursive structural conditions that shape the effectiveness of state power, but the other approaches considered here would find few difficulties in subscribing to this theme. This suggests that an adequate theory of the state can only be produced as part of a wider theory of society. Even the neo-statists’ principled rejection of a society-centred approach draws on arguments about the wider society both to reveal the state’s distinctive logic and interests and to explore the conditions for its autonomy and effectiveness. Foucauldian, feminist, and discourse-analytic studies are even more clearly oriented to wider concerns: Foucault starts from a socially dispersed micro-physics of power, feminism is concerned with gender relations, and stateless state theory begins from the discursive constitution of the state. Recent Marxist work also continues, of course, to relate the state to capitalism and the anatomy of civil society. It is precisely here, however, that many of the unresolved problems of state theory are located. For the state is the site of a paradox. On the one hand, it is just one institutional ensemble among others within a social formation; on the other, it is peculiarly charged with overall responsibility for maintaining the cohesion of the social formation of which it is a part. Its paradoxical position as both part and whole of society means that it is continually called upon by diverse social forces to resolve society’s problems and is equally continually
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doomed to generate ‘state failure’ since so many of society’s problems lie well beyond its control and can even be aggravated by attempted intervention. Many of the differences between theories of the state considered above are rooted in contrary approaches to various structural and strategic moments of this paradox. Trying to comprehend the overall logic (or, perhaps, ‘illogic’) of this paradox may well be the best route to resolving some of these differences as well as providing a more comprehensive analysis of the strategic-relational character of the state in a polycentric social formation.
Notes 1. This paper has benefited from the excellent editorial work of Paul Reynolds. None the less final responsibility for the text in its present form remains with me. 2. For useful reviews of such Marxist theorizing, see C. W. Barrow, Critical Theories of The State: Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Post-Marxist (Madison, University Of Wisconsin Press, 1993); B. Jessop, ‘Recent Theories of the Capitalist State’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 1/4, 1977, 353–73; B. Jessop, The Capitalist State (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982); B. Jessop, State Theory: Putting Capitalist States in their Place (Cambridge, Polity, 1990); M. Carnoy, The State and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1984); S. Clarke (ed.), The State Debate (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1990); E. Altvater and J. Hoffman, ‘The West German State Derivation Debate’, Social Text 8/2, 1990, 134–55; N. Chandhoke, State and Civil Society: Explorations in Political Theory (New Delhi, Sage, 1995). A supporting role was played by Marxistfeminists seeking to extend such ideas to the patriarchal capitalist state. On Marxist-feminism, see V. Burstyn, ‘Masculine Dominance and the State’, in The Socialist Register (London, Merlin Press, 1983) pp. 45–89. 3. On critical theory and the state, see M. Horkheimer, ‘The Authoritarian State’, Telos, 15 (1942)/1973; O. Kirchheimer, Politics, Law and Social Change: Selected Essays of Otto Kirchheimer (New York, Columbia University Press, 1969); F. Neumann, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State (Glencoe, IL, Free Press, 1964). An accessible introduction to the Frankfurt School is provided by D. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Cambridge, Polity, 1980). 4. For various criticisms of these positions, see Carnoy, The State and Political Theory (note 2); Jessop ‘Recent Theories of the Capitalist State’ (note 2), The Capitalist State (note 2), State Theory; C. Offe, Strukturprobleme des Kapitalistischen Staates (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp 1972). N. Poulantzas State, Power, Socialism (London, Verso, 1978). 5. For example, J. Hirsch, ‘Bemerkungen zum theoretischen Ansatz einer Analyse des bürgerlichen Staates’, Gesellschaft 8–9 (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1976) pp. 99–149; C. Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State (London, Hutchinson, 1984); N. Poulantzas, State, Power and Socialism; G. Reuten and M. Williams, Value-Form and the State (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989).
Recent Developments in State Theory 139 6. See especially, Offe, Strukturprobleme des Kapitalistischen Staates (note 4); Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (note 5). 7. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London, Lawrence & Wishart 1971). 8. For example, S. Golding, Gramsci: Contributions to a Theory of Post Liberal Democracy (Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1992); A. S. Sassoon, Women and the State (London, Hutchinson, 1985); B. Smart, ‘The politics of truth and the power of hegemony’, in D. C. Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford, Blackwell, 1986); and R. Holub, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Post-Modernism (London, Routledge, 1992). 9. For example, J. Häusler and J. Hirsch, ‘Regulation und Parteien im Übergang zum “post-Fordismus” ’, Das Argument 165, 1987, pp. 651–71; J. Jenson, ‘Representations in crisis: the roots of Canada’s permeable Fordism’, Canadian Journal of Political Science 24/4, 1990, 653–83; B. Jessop, ‘Regulation und der Staat: Integrale Wirtschaft und integrale Politik’, in A. Demirovic et al. (eds), Akkumulation, Hegemonie und Staat (Münster, Westfälisches Dampfboot Verlag, 1992), pp. 232–62. A. Noël, ‘Action collective, Partis Politiques et Relations Industrielles: Une Logique Pur à l’Approche de la Regulation’, Paper given at the International Conference on Regulation Theory, Barcelona, 16–18 July 1988. 10. This is not an exhaustive discussion, but will suffice to illustrate the range of positions in the second revival. 11. Even Weber’s work can be interpreted differently: it has been invoked, for example, to show that the state does not exist but is a reflexive use of ideas to enhance the legitimacy of a ruling elite. D. Melossi, The State of Social Control: A Sociological Study of Concepts of State and Social Control in the Making of Democracy (Cambridge, Polity, 1990) pp. 63–5. 12. For example, S. D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1978); E. A. Nordlinger, The Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1981); T. Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979); A. Stepan, ‘State Power and the Strength of Civil Society in the Southern Cone of Latin America’, in P. B. Evans, D. Rüschemeyer and T. Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985) pp. 317–45. 13. For example, C. Dandeker, Surveillance, Power and Modernity: Bureaucracy and Discipline from 1700 to the Present Day (Cambridge, Polity, 1990); A. Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge, Polity, 1985); M. Mann, ‘The Autonomous Power Of The State’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie 25/2, 1983, 187–213; E. A. Nordlinger, The Autonomy of the Democratic State (note 12); T. Skocpol, ‘Bringing the State Back in: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research’, in P. B. Evans et al., Bringing The State Back In (note 12), pp. 3–37. 14. For example, M. Shaw, Post-Military Society (Cambridge, Polity, 1991). 15. A. Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (note 13). 16. For example, M. Mann, The Social Sources of Power, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985); M. Mann, ‘War and Social Theory’, in M. Shaw and C. Creighton (eds), The Sociology of War and Peace (London, Macmillan, 1987), pp. 54–72; C. Tilly in C. Tilly (ed.), The Formation of
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17.
18.
19.
20.
21. 22.
23. 24. 25. 26. 27.
28.
29.
30.
National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1973); C. Dandeker, Surveillance, Power and Modernity (note 13); M. Shaw, Post-Military Society (note 14). In my earlier critique of neo-statism, only four of these were listed (see B. Jessop State Theory (note 2)), the fifth set of charges, listed second here, is just as important. For example, G. W. Domhoff, ‘The Wagner Act and Theories of the State’, in M. J. Zeitlin (ed.), Political and Social Theory (Greenwich, CT, Jai, 1987) pp. 159–85; G. Almond, ‘Return to the State’, American Political Science Review 82/3, 1988, 853–74. L. Gordon, ‘The Welfare-State: Towards a Socialist-Feminist Perspective’, in R. Miliband, L. Panitch and J. Saville (eds), Socialist Register (London, Merlin, 1990) pp. 171–200, p. 181. For example, P. Cammack ‘Bringing the State Back in?’, British Journal of Political Science 19/3, 1989, 269–74; P. Cammack, ‘Statism, New Institutionalism, and Marxism’, in Miliband et al., Socialist Register (note 19), pp. 147–69; T. Mitchell, ‘The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics’, American Political Science Review 85/1, 1991, 77–96. L. Binder, ‘The Natural History of Development Theory’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 28/1, 1988, 3–33. For example, M. M. Atkinson and W. D. Coleman, ‘Policy Networks, Policy Communities and the Problems of Governance’, Governance 5/2, 1992, 154–80. N. Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London, Verso, 1974); B. Jessop, State Theory (note 2). Ibid. T. Mitchell, ‘The Limits of the State (note 20), pp. 77–96. B. Jessop, State Theory (note 2). See notably M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978); M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge (Brighton, Harvester, 1980). R. Pringle and S. Watson, ‘ “Women’s Interests” and the Post-Structuralist State’, in M. Barrett and A. Phillips (eds), Destabilising Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates (Cambridge, Polity, 1992) p. 56. C. Gordon, ‘Governmental Rationality: an Introduction’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) pp. 1–52. For a critique of the Foucauldian pretensions of Giddens, see R. Boyne, ‘Power-Knowledge and Social Theory: the Systemic Misrepresentation of Contemporary French Social Theory in the Work of Anthony Giddens’, in G. C. A. Bryant and D. Jary (eds), Giddens’s Theory of Structuration: A Critical Appreciation (London, Routledge, 1991) pp. 52–73. Also see A. Barry et al. (eds), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government (London, UCL Press, 1996); G. Burchell et al., The Foucault Effect (note 28); P. Miller and N. Rose ‘Governing Economic Life’, Economy and Society 19/1, 1990, 1–3; N. Rose and P. Miller, ‘Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government’, British Journal of Sociology 43/2, 1992, 173–205. For example, A. Barry et al., Foucault and Political Reason; G. Burchell et al., The Foucault Effect (note 28); P. Miller and N. Rose, ‘Governing Economic Life’ (note 29); N. Rose and P. Miller, ‘Political Power Beyond the State’ (note
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31. 32. 33.
34.
35. 36. 37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42. 43.
44.
45.
46.
29); and B. Hindess and D. Mitchell (eds), Governing Australia (Sydney, Oxford University Press, 1998). C. Dandeker, Surveillance, Power and Modernity (note 13). N. Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (note 4). For example, C. A. MacKinnon, ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: Towards Feminist Jurisprudence’, Signs 8/4, 1985, 635–58; R. W. Connell, ‘The State, Gender and Sexual Politics’, Theory and Society 19/5, 1990, 507–44. J. Allen, ‘Does Feminism need a Theory of the State?’, in S. Watson (ed.), Playing the State: Australian Feminist Interventions (London, Verso, 1990) pp. 21–38. Ibid. p. 28. MacKinnon, ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method’ (note 33). W. Brown, ‘Finding the Man in the State’, Feminist Studies 18/1, 1992, 7–34, p. 7; D. S. Franzway et al., Staking a Claim: Feminism, Bureaucracy and the State (Cambridge, Polity, 1989) pp. 12–13. There are four such faces: (a) juridical-legislative or liberal (a proper focus for feminist jurisprudence); (b) capitalist – property rights and capitalism; (c) prerogative – legitimate arbitrary power marking the state as a state (police, military, security); and (d) bureaucratic – W. Brown, ‘Finding the Man in the State’ (note 37), pp. 13–14. R. Mahon ‘From “Bringing” to “Putting”: the State in late Twentieth-century Social Theory’, Canadian Journal of Sociology 16/2, 1991, 119–44; R. Pringle and S. Watson, ‘ “Women’s Interests” and the post-Structuralist State’ (note 27). For example, M. McIntosh, ‘The State and the Oppression of Women’, in A. Kuhn and A-M. Wolpe (eds), Feminism and Materialism (London, Routledge, 1978) pp. 254–89; Z. Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Femininsm (Harlow, Longman, 1981). R. Pringle, ‘Destabilising Patriarchy’, in B. Caine and R. Pringle (eds), Transitions, New Australian Feminisms (St Leonards, NSW, Allen & Unwin, 1995). M. Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (London, Zed Books, 1986) p. 26. MacKinnon’s position is ambivalent in this regard: she treats law as patriarchal because it is gender-blind and gender interests themselves are pregiven. For critiques of early feminist state theories, see Allen, ‘Does Feminism need a Theory of the State’ (note 34), pp. 26–7; F. Anthias and N. Yuval-Davis, ‘Introduction’, in F. Anthias and N. Yuval-Davis (eds), Woman-Nation-State (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1989); Connell, ‘The State, Gender and Sexual Politics’ (note 33), pp. 516–17; Pringle and Watson ‘ “Woman’s interests” and the Post-Structuralist State’ (note 27), pp. 62–3. Criticisms in J. Jenson, ‘Gender and Reproduction: or Babies and the State’, in Studies in Political Economy 20, Summer 1986, 9–46; S. Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy (Cambridge, Polity, 1989). J. Jenson, ‘Gender and Reproduction: or Babies and the State’ (note 45), p. 10; J. Brenner and B. Laslett, ‘Gender, Social Reproduction and Women’s Self Organization: Considering the U.S. Welfare State’, Gender and Society 5/3, 1991, 311–33.
142 Bob Jessop 47. For example, E. Boris, ‘The Racialized Gendered State: Constructions of Citizenship in the United States’, Social Politics 2/2, 1995, 160–80; D. Sainsbury (ed.), Gendering Welfare States (London, Sage, 1994); F. Williams, ‘Race/ethnicity, Gender and Class in Welfare States: a Framework for Comparative Analysis’, Social Politics 2/2, 1995, 126–59. 48. On third wave feminism, see J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London, Routledge, 1990); N. Fraser, ‘Equality, Difference and Democracy: Recent Feminist Debates in the United States’, in J. Dodi (ed.), Feminism and the New Democracy: Re-Siting the Political (London, Routledge, 1997) pp. 98–109; M. M. Ferree, J. Lorber and B. B. Hess (eds), Revisioning Gender (London, Sage, 1999); V. Randall and G. Waylen (eds), Gender, Politics and the State (London, Routledge, 1998); and N. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London, Sage, 1996). For a useful introduction to queer theory, see L. Dugan ‘Queering the State’, Social Text 39, 1994, 1–14. 49. In distinguishing between discourses, institutions, and material practices, I am not trying to deny the materiality of discourses nor suggesting that institutions or material practices are non-discursive. I am simply noting that not all discourses are translated into institutions and material practices with emergent properties that are irreducible to the content of these discourses. 50. This pithy statement comes from S. W. Moore, The Critque of Capitalist Democracy (New York, Paine-Whitman, 1957). 51. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge, Polity, 1995); R. W. Connell, ‘New Directions in Gender Theory, Masculinity Research, and Gender Politics’, Ethnos 61/3–4, 1996, 157–76. 52. Z. Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (note 40). 53. C. Pateman ‘Femininst Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy’, in Pateman, The Disorder of Women (Cambridge, Polity, 1989) pp. 118–40. C. Pateman, ‘The Patriarchal Welfare State’, in ibid. pp. 203 et seq. 54. Feminists usually criticize the oppressive effects of the public-private split; but Elshtain has argued that women who go public must sacrifice the maternal values that are rooted in family life, see J. B. Elshtain, Public Man-Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1981); see also B. Siim, ‘Towards a Feminist Rethinking of the Welfare State’, in K. B. Jones and A. G. Jonasdottir (eds), The Political Interests of Gender (London, Sage, 1988) esp. p. 163. 55. R. W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Cambridge, Polity, 1987) p. 126; J. B. Elshtain, Women and War (New York, Basic Books, 1987). 56. Respectively M. Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Meta-Ethics of Radical Feminism (Boston, Beacon Press, 1978); D. Fernbach, The Spiral Path (London, Gay Men’s Press, 1981). 57. G. Lloyd ‘Selfhood, Masculinity and War’, in C. Pateman and E. Grosz (eds), Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory (London, Allen Unwin, 1986) p. 64. 58. J. B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1988); R. W. Connell, ‘The State, Gender and Sexual Politics’ (note 33), p. 521; on modern bureaucracies, whether public or private, K. E. Ferguson, The Femininst Case against Bureaucracy (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1984), and, more generally on dif-
Recent Developments in State Theory 143
59.
60.
61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.
68.
69.
ferent forms of masculinity, R. W. Connell, Masculinities (note 51), and R. W. Connell, ‘New Directions in Gender Theory, Masculinity Research and Gender Politics’ (note 51). For example, V. S. Peterson (ed.), Gendered States: Femininst (Re-) Visions of International Relations Theory (Boulder, Westview, 1992); C. Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994); for critical feminist appropriations of the latter, see, for example, D. Cooper, Sexing the City: Lesbian and Gay Politics within the Activist State (London, Rivers Oram Press, 1995); B. Martin, ‘Femininsm, Criticism and Foucault’, New German Critique 27, 1982, 3–30; J. Sawacki, ‘Foucault and Feminism: Towards a Politics of Difference’, in M. L. Stanley and C. Pateman (eds), Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory (Cambridge, Polity, 1991) pp. 217–31. For more extended reviews of these issues from a state-theoretical perspective, see B. Jessop, ‘Nationalstaat, Globalisierung, und Gender’, Politische Vierteljahresschrift, Sonderheft 28 (Opladen, Westdeutsche Verlag, 1997) pp. 262–92; and B. Jessop, ‘Die geschlechtsspezifische Selektivität des Staates’ (The Gender Selectivity of the State), in E. Kreisky, S. Lang and B. Sauer (eds), Das Geschlecht des Staates. Transformationen von Staatlichkeit in Europa (Opladen, Böhret, 2000) (in press). This is suggested, for example, in P. Abrams, ‘Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 1977/1978, p. 77. Ibid. For example, D. Easton, ‘The Political System Besieged by the State’, Political Theory 9/3, 1981, 303–25. P. Corrigan and D. Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (London, Quartet, 1985). D. Melossi, The State of Social Control (note 11), pp. 2, 6, 150. Ibid. p. 128; S. Watson, ‘The State of Play: an Introduction’, Playing the State (note 34), p. 7. See, for example, F. Fischer and J. Forester (eds), The Argumentative Turn in Analysis and Planning (Durham, Duke University Press, 1993); E. Roe, Narrative Policy Analysis: Theory and Practice (Durham, Duke University Press, 1994). See, for example, J. Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995); D. Campbell, Writing Security: US Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester; Manchester University Press, 1992); T. W. Luke, ‘Placing Power/Sitting Space: the Politics of Global and Local in the New World Order’, Environment and Planning: Society and Space 12/4, 1994, 613–28; G. O Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: the Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996); G. O Tuathail and T. Luke, ‘Present at the (Dis)integration: Deterritorialisation and Reterritorialisation in the New World Order’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84, 1994, 381–98; R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993). It is impossible to give an adequate account of autopoietic systems theory in this article: for introductions, see N. Luhmann, ‘Staat und Staatraeson im Übergang von traditioneller Herrschaft zu moderne Politik’, in Luhmann,
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70.
71.
72. 73. 74.
75.
76.
Gesellschaft und Semantik 3 (Frankfurt, Surkamp, 1990) pp. 65–148; and Jessop, State Theory (note 2). See N. Luhmann, ‘Staat and Staatraeson’ (note 69); G. Teubner, Recht als Autopoietisches System (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1989); and, most importantly in this context, H. Willke, Ironie des Staates (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1992); on changing state capacities and knowledge, see also P. Wagner, ‘Social Science and the State in Continental Western Europe: the Political Structuration of Disciplinary Discourse’, International Social Science Journal 122, 1989, 509–28; and B. Wittrock, ‘Social Science and State Development: Transformations of the Discourse of Modernity’, International Social Science Journal 122, 1989, 498–507. J. P. Nettl ‘The State as a Conceptual Variable’, World Politics 20/3, 1969, 551–92; K. F. H. Dyson, The State Tradition in Western Europe (Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1982); D. Melossi, The State of Social Control (note 65). B. Badie and B. Birnbaum, The Sociology of the State (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1983). On the latter, see especially M. I. Handel, Weak States in the International System (London, Frank Cass, 1990, 2nd edn). For example, M. Castells, ‘Four Asian Tigers with a Dragon’s Head’, in J. Henderson and R. P. Appelbaum (eds), States and Development in the Pacific Rim (London, Sage, 1992); P. B. Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial transformation (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1995); C. J. Johnson, ‘Political Institutions and Economic Performance: The Government-Business Relationship in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan’, in F. C. Deyo (ed.), The Political Economy of the New South Asian Industrialism (Ithica, Cornell University Press, 1987); M. Levi, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988); L. Weiss and J. Hobson, States and Economic Development: a Comparative Historical Analysis (Cambridge, Polity, 1995). Thus states have been described as strong because they have a large public sector, authoritarian rule, strong societal support, a weak and gelatinous civil society, cohesive bureaucracies, an interventionist policy, or the power to limit external interference. See L. S. Lauridsen, ‘The Debate on the Developmental State’, in J. Martinussen (ed.), Development Theory and the Role of the State in Third World Countries (Roskilde, Roskilde University Centre, 1991) pp. 108–33; and J. Migdal, Strong States and Weak Societies (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988). For different approaches to both issues, see N. Brenner, ‘Beyond State-Centrism? Space, Territoriality, and Geographical Scale in Globalization Studies’, Theory and Society 28/1, 1999, 39–78; J. A. Caporaso, ‘The European Union and Forms of the State: Westphalian, Regulatory or Postmodern?’, Journal of Common Market Studies 34/1, 1996, 28–52. T. Evers, ‘Supranationale Staatlichkeit am Beispiel der Europäischen Union: Civitas Civtatum oder Monstrum?’, Leviathan 1, 1994, 115–34. P. Q. Hirst and G. Thompson, ‘Globalization and the Future of the Nation-state’, Economy and Society 24/3, 1995, 408–42; B. Jessop ‘Die Zukunft des Nationalstaats: Erosion oder Reorganisation? Grundsätzliche Überlegungen zu Westeuropa’, in F. Deppe and W. Burkhardt (eds), Europäeische Integration and Politische Regulierung – Aspeckte, Dimensionen, Perspektiven (Marburg an der Lahn, FEG Studien,
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77.
78.
79. 80.
81.
1995) pp. 9–48; M. Mann, ‘Nation-states in Europe and Other Continents: Diversifying, Developing, not Dying’, Daedalus 122/3, 1993, 115–40; P. C. Schmitter, ‘Representation and the Future Euro-Polity’, Staatswissenschaften und Staatspraxis 3/3, 1992, 379–405; P. G. Taylor, ‘Beyond Container, Internationality, Interstateness, Interterritoriality’, Progress in Human Geography 19/1, 1995, 1–22; M. Zuern, ‘Jenseits der Staatlichkeit’, Leviathan 4, 1992, 490–513; G. Ziebura, ‘Über den Nationalstaat’, Leviathan 4, 1992, 467–89. On governance, see, for example, B. Jessop, ‘The Regulation Approach and Governance Theory: Alternative Perspectives on Econonmic and Political Change?’, Economy and Society 24/3, 1995, 307–33; H. Kitschelt, ‘Industrial Governance Structures, Innovation Strategies, and the Case of Japan: Sectoral or Cross-national Comparative Analysis?’, International Organization 45/4, 1991, 453–93; J. Kooiman (ed.), Modern Governance (London, Sage, 1993); W. Streeck and P. C. Schmitter (eds), Private Interest Government: Beyond Market and State (London, Sage, 1985). It is ironic in the Rortyian sense of political commitment aware of its own contingency and likely future alteration: see R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989); H. Willke, ‘The Tragedy of the State: Prolegomenona to a Theory of the State in Polycentric Society’, Archiv für Sozial-und Rechtsphilosophie 72/4, 1992, 455–67; Willke, Ironie des Staates (note 70). See Jessop, State Theory (note 2). I first identified these themes in my book on State Theory. There is clearly a danger in reading other theoretical trajectories in terms of such a convergence but, with all due caution, it does seem that the following themes are increasingly widespread and are still informing current research on the state. R. B. Bertramsen et al., State, Economy, and Society (London, Unwin Hyman, 1990).
7 Marxism, Liberalism and State Theory Paul Wetherly
Introduction This chapter focuses on one aspect of the debate between Marxism and liberalism by examining them as theories of the state. Marxism could be compared with other traditions of state theory but liberalism has been selected here because these constitute ‘the two most central traditions of contemporary political thought’.1 They are compared as rival accounts of the contemporary state simply because this is a central question in political thought. The objective in bringing these two perspectives into direct confrontation is to illuminate areas of continuity and discontinuity, and thereby contribute to an assessment of the state of play of the Marxist-liberal debate in relation to the state. The discussion that follows is organized in terms of a number of connected themes, but one key underlying theme is worth highlighting here. Marxism and liberalism are compared in terms of their characterizations of the relationship between the state and ‘civil society’ or, more narrowly, the economy. More specifically the two traditions are discussed in terms of the distinction between ‘state-centred’ and ‘societycentred’ accounts of the state. It is argued that the two perspectives can usefully be distinguished in these terms: liberalism providing a source of state-centred arguments in which the state is presented as an independent structure with its own interests, and Marxism providing an essentially society-centred account of the state in which it is largely influenced by (if not reducible to) interests and actors within society. The key question is, in essence, what are the limits of independent action by the state? The analysis necessarily uses the broadest of brush strokes as it is not 146
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possible in short compass to encapsulate the range of thinking about the state which has developed within each tradition. However, whatever the range of debates within Marxism or liberalism there must be some essential or basic elements for these labels to have any purchase. Hopefully in what follows something of this essence of each perspective can be captured without lapsing into caricature.
Freedom and anti-statism At the most general level Marxism and liberalism share a set of Enlightenment values and concepts, such as rationalism, progress and freedom or autonomy.2 This last is a contested concept, and the basic rivalry between these two traditions centres on radically different conceptions of the social conditions necessary to realize a particular conception of this ultimate value (capitalism versus communism). Nevertheless this shared value gives to both a distinctly anti-statist temper, for they ‘share a vision of reducing arbitrary power and regulatory capacity to its lowest possible extent’, a commitment to what Held calls a ‘principle of autonomy’.3 There is evidently a tension between the goal of freedom and the reality of the state which is a set of institutions capable of making and enforcing rules and claiming a monopoly of physical force or coercion; between liberty and authority. What, then, is the historical justification for the state?
The necessity for the state Hoffman comments that liberalism is ‘both a theory of and against the state’, and this is because the liberal argument for the state is based on ‘assumptions which on the surface at least are profoundly anti-statist in character’.4 The argument for authority is based on the claim of liberty. In liberal thought the state is regarded as ‘a permanent necessary evil’5 whose central task is, essentially, to secure individual freedom or, more expansively, the ‘life, liberty and possessions’ of each member of society. Here we see that the argument for the state is derived from an account of the character of civil society (even though this may be a fictional ‘state of nature’). Liberty requires that individuals are able to go about their daily business – pursuing their own conception of the good in their own way – free from interference by others. This requires the rule of law, hence the state, to secure a framework of mutual non-interference. In this sense the state is necessary to ensure the basic conditions for liberty and an orderly social life.
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For Marxism, too, the state is derived from a characterization of civil society and its task is to regulate conflicting interests to ensure social order. Again the state is seen as a ‘necessary evil’ but its necessity is closely bound up with the division of society into antagonistic classes rather than competing individuals. For Engels the state is a product of society at a particular stage of development; it is the admission that this society has involved itself in insoluble selfcontradiction and is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to exorcize. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in a fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state.6 Keeping class conflict within the bounds of order means preserving class rule – hence the coercive apparatus of the state is essentially ‘a means of class domination’.7 A basic contrast between Marxism and liberalism is apparent here in ‘two key versions of the state/non-state contrast, namely, “the state and civil society” and “the state and the individual”’ respectively.8 The first ‘projects questions about the interrelation between socially powerful interests and the apparatus of government’, whereas the second ‘construes central political questions in terms of the relations between particular citizens and government’.9 For liberalism society is reducible to the individuals who are its basic constituents, whereas the socially powerful interests with which marxism is concerned are those of class forces. Since, in the marxist view, class division is a feature of society at particular stages of development the state, in contrast to liberalism, is not a permanent evil. Thus in classical Marxism the state is expected to wither away in classless communist society. From this it seems that Marxism’s anti-statism is more thoroughgoing in the sense that the tension between liberty and authority in liberal thought is transcended – the realization of freedom permits and requires the end of the state.10 However Marxism has its own ‘for and against’ view in so far as the (negative) concept of the state as means of class domination is qualified by a (positive) assessment of the scope for reform within capitalist society and the concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ after capitalism. A further important contrast to be noted here is that whereas
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classical liberalism is essentially a normative theory of the state, an account of why the state is necessary and what its role should be, Marxism aims at historical explanation of the development of the modern state and its future passing in terms of transformations of the economic structure and class relations.
Societal dynamic Liberalism and Marxism have tended to share a perspective which sees the source of societal dynamics and progress in civil society, especially the market or capitalist mode of production. Both approaches analyze the economic sphere, at least at an abstract level, as an autonomous realm characterized by its own laws of motion or dynamic (laws of supply and demand and the price mechanism, the circuit of capital and law of value). The market or capitalist order is seen as logically prior to, and supplying the point of reference for understanding, politics and the state. Thus both approaches adopt a society-centred view of the economy. For liberals the market is understood as a ‘voluntary exchange system’ which acts as a device for co-ordinating the independent decisions of a large number of economic actors and promoting innovation and economic efficiency. Private property in a free market system is defended as ‘the embodiment of individual liberty’11 and a bulwark against despotic government. There is thus a causal link between the market order and political power. Private property decentralizes power and decision making, allowing individuals to pursue their own life plans and use their resources to support whatever political goals they choose. Marxists accept key aspects of the liberal analysis of market exchange, particularly the in-built tendency towards innovation, productivity improvement and capital accumulation driven by competition and the profit motive. Capitalism’s ‘progressive mission’ is to stimulate rapid development of the productive forces and thereby create the material conditions in which a transition to socialism becomes possible. Marx’s methodological collectivist standpoint, evident in the treatment of ‘individuals . . . only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests’12 appears to contrast sharply with the methodological individualism characteristic of liberalism in which individuals are the basic units of analysis and social phenomena are reducible to their beliefs and actions. In fact both the Marxist and liberal economic models assume particular motivations and behaviours can be tied to
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particular roles, such as profit-maximizing by capitalists. It is the assumption of predictable, rational, behaviour on the part of economic agents that permits the analysis of economic laws. However it is, of course, the characterization of capitalism as a system of class relations that differentiates Marxism most clearly from the liberal depiction of an individualistic system of voluntary exchange. There are two key aspects to this. First private property is a device for distributing freedom and unfreedom. The freedom which an individual enjoys from using property as he or she chooses entails that others are prohibited its use: freedom and unfreedom are two sides of the same coin. The propertyless are compelled to sell their labour power to owners of the means of production. Although it is true that there is freedom for the worker in the degree of choice which comes from there being a great number of employers13 this does not answer the basic point that the livelihood of the worker depends on the sale of labour power to a capitalist. It is possible, though difficult, for individual workers to escape this dependence but impossible for the class as a whole.14 The second key aspect of the Marxist analysis of class relations is the contrast between the apparent freedom and equality of exchange and the subordination of the worker in the sphere of production. Marx employs the distinction between labour and labour power to show that, even assuming exchange of equivalents (the wage is equivalent to the value of labour power), exploitation occurs ‘automatically’ within the sphere of production because of capitalist control of the labour process. On this basis the relations of production are revealed as relations of effective control or power (as opposed to voluntary exchange) and as the basis of endemic class conflict (as opposed to mutual advantage).
The growth of the state The idea common to both Marxist and liberal thought that the state is necessary to maintain social order encompasses distinctive views of the necessary economic functions of the state. In other words, despite the idea of autonomous economic laws, both Marxists and liberals argue that a capitalist or market order has certain political conditions of existence. In liberal thought the state is necessary to secure conditions in which markets can function and to act in areas of market failure.15 Friedman argues that the functioning of the market ‘presumes’ the discharge of a number of tasks by the state as ‘rule maker and umpire’. These tasks include: the maintenance of law and order; the enforcement of contracts;
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the securing of property rights; and, the provision of a monetary framework.16 This conception of the state is explicitly coercive: law and order has to be maintained, contracts enforced and property rights secured. Without the state private property might be challenged, contracts broken, and so on. Thus although the market is a voluntary (i.e., non-coercive) exchange system it requires a coercive state as guarantor. Friedman’s is also a recipe for a minimal state, charged with securing only those conditions which are necessary for a market to function at all and which the market itself cannot create. It is a recipe, in other words, for a free market or laissez-faire economy. John Gray has observed that there is no necessary logical connection between liberalism and the idea of the minimum state and that classical liberals such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill ‘allowed government important service functions’ not consistent with a strict principle of laissez-faire.17 Furthermore certain strands within the liberal tradition, notably utilitarianism and New Liberalism, have provided justifications of an interventionist state. However the ideal of a minimum state can be seen as the dominant liberal view. For example for Mill ‘laissez-faire . . . should be the general practice: every departure from it, unless required by some great good, is a certain evil’.18 As Gray comments, this position involves ‘a strong presumption in favor of non-interference’.19 The idea of the minimum state is closely associated with a negative conception of liberty seen to consist, on the most stringent view, merely in the absence of coercion or interference. Being able to live their lives as they choose requires that individuals are free of interference by other persons, but also by the state. Thus in the field of welfare the liberal preference is for ‘a minimal welfare state consisting of safety net services for the poor’, and the ‘revisionary conception of government as the guardian and provider of general welfare’ is rejected.20 The liberal conception of the minimum state is essentially a normative or prescriptive theory rather than an explanation of state power.21 There is no argument to show how these narrowly prescribed functional requirements may be or are translated into political action, there is no economic explanation of state power in the sense of a systemic link between the functioning of the market and the role of the state. The liberal argument is that the political realm ought to be functionally subordinate to the economy rather than that the economic sphere actually exerts a determining role. From this perspective the growth of the state, particularly the universalistic welfare state, is seen as unprincipled and irrational. The problem is, in essence, that the state has intruded too far into that
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minimum area within which individuals should be free from interference.22 The ‘for and against the state’ dualism noted earlier is plain: the argument for the state as guarantor of liberty is here expressed on its other side, as an argument against the state as an overweening threat to liberty. Similarly the argument for the state to secure conditions in which markets can function becomes an argument against the strongly negative impact of state growth on the market order. An important feature of liberal explanations of the growth of the state is that they are strongly ‘state-centred’. The main thrust is to demonstrate that ‘democratic political systems can generate pathological results’23 and the arguments focus on the institutional arrangements and procedures of liberal democracy: party competition, voting behaviour, interest groups, and the functioning of public bureaucracies.24 For example public bureaucrats are depicted as budget maximizers so that there is an in-built tendency to the oversupply of outputs by the state.25 Whatever the criticisms of the budget maximizing model, the main thrust of such neo-liberal claims has been to assert that the state has its own interests and capacity for independent action. Like liberalism, Marxism recognizes that the capitalist economy is not self-sufficient, that it has political conditions of existence. There is a similar emphasis on the need for the state as guarantor of an economic order which is itself free of coercion.26 It can be argued that the Marxist conception builds on the liberal view by adding a class dimension. There is a need inherent in every society, recognized in liberal theory, to enforce the rule of law. But in a class-divided society the rule of law has a crucial class character. In the Marxist view, as in the quote from Engels already given, the threat to the ‘voluntary’ order of the market comes specifically from the clash of class interests arising in the formally free and equal exchange between capital and labour. And maintaining ‘order’ entails maintaining class domination. Thus in classical Marxism ‘the State in bourgeois society is the repressive arm of the bourgeoisie’.27 Here is a Marxist version of the minimum state concept, defined essentially as a coercive apparatus.28 Although there are discussions by Marx of important early forms of state intervention, notably the Factory Acts, the growth of the state appears to be equally at odds with the classical Marxist coercive state as with the minimum liberal state. However a major theme of contemporary marxist theories of the state is that the political conditions of existence of capitalism are more extensive than these models allow. In order to ensure the reproduction of capitalist relations of production and successful capital accumulation the state has to secure a number of
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‘functional requirements’ that go well beyond repression of the subordinate class. These include, for example, provision of economic infrastructure, reproduction of labour power, and maintenance of social harmony.29 In addition the growth of the state is explained in terms of the logic of capitalist development and the generation of new ‘needs’ for state intervention.30 Thus, quite apart from recurrent economic crises, Marxists see the self-regulatory capacity of the market or capitalist economy as weaker than in the liberal view. Correspondingly Marxists are more likely to stress the compatibility of state power with economic power than the negative impact of state growth. So it is argued that, far from the result of unprincipled state growth restricting liberty and impeding the market mechanism, ‘the functioning and management of state welfare remains part of a capitalist state which is fundamentally concerned with the maintenance and reproduction of capitalist social relations’.31 This idea of the capitalist state is the predominant or orthodox conception in Marxism but is qualified by two subordinate themes. First, the maintenance and reproduction of capitalist social relations is not the whole story for it is recognized that the state can and does respond to other needs and interests in civil society. In particular there is some scope for reforms which may the focus of working class political struggle and bring real improvements in the conditions of life of members of the class. Marx’s analysis of the Factory Acts as ‘the product of a protracted civil war . . . between the capitalist class and the working class’32 expresses this idea, and the welfare state may be seen, in part, as the fruit of such struggle rather than simply reflecting the needs of capital. Second, and partly as a consequence of the efficacy of class struggle, state actions are not analysed as always functional for capital, or even neutral, but as sometimes, or in part, dysfunctional. Thus state welfare expenditure may be viewed as indirectly productive and an unproductive burden on capital accumulation,33 or as contradictory.34 Thus in contrast to the state-centred approach of liberalism Marxism emphasizes the demand or requirement for state action emanating from civil society and sees the tendency for state growth not as in-built but as driven by economic requirements, interests and development. This ‘economic determination’ runs along two lines: a ‘class-theoretical approach’ and a ‘capital-theoretical approach’.35 Along one line the major social classes, rooted in the economic structure, seek to use political power to protect and advance their own interests. The classical form of this argument is an ‘instrumental’ account as suggested by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto.36 Along the other line the structural location of
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the state is emphasized: its simultaneous separation from and dependence on capital accumulation, and the consequence that the state must submit to the ‘imperatives’ of the accumulation process. Contemporary Marxists have been keen to avoid a charge of determinism or reductionism and generally argue that economic determination leaves room for the ‘relative autonomy’ of the state. Thus the state may respond to pressure from below and the accumulation process may leave space for reform. The idea of dependency of the state on capital accumulation provides a powerful mechanism whereby ‘state managers’ who are independent of the capitalist class and have their own interests will tend to implement policies favourable to capital, even on the basis of rejection of the idea of a class-conscious ruling class. The mechanism is the sensitivity of state managers to ‘business confidence’ because such confidence is a crucial ingredient of capital accumulation and thereby the state’s own revenues and legitimacy. Hence state managers need to implement policies which sustain ‘business confidence’, that is policies favourable to capital.37 An interesting feature of this kind of approach is that it introduces into Marxism a form of state-centred theorizing similar to that encountered in liberal theory. Although Marxist accounts of the state do not thus rely simply upon an account of capitalist interests or functional requirements of capital but may also allow the influence of working class interests and those of state managers, the approach emphasizes the limits to independent or autonomous action by the state and sees the possibilities of reform or of the state acting ‘for the public’ as severely limited. The state in capitalist society is seen as, in the end, a capitalist state.
Common good versus class theory of the state This concept of a capitalist state points up a key contrast between Marxism and liberalism. Whereas liberalism may be characterized as a ‘common good’ theory of the state, marxism asserts that the state is closely bound up with class interests and conflict. As Held expresses this distinction, for Marxism, as against liberalism, ‘the state . . . is not an independent structure or set of institutions above society, that is a ‘public power’ acting for ‘the public’. On the contrary, it is deeply embedded in socio-economic relations and linked to particular interests’.38 Common good theories of the state claim that ‘government is the servant of the people placed there by the people to perform that function’.39 Carnoy characterizes pluralist theory specifically in this way but the conception is central to the liberal tradition. Whether the
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primary social entities are conceived as individuals (classical liberalism) or groups (pluralism) the state is seen more-or-less as a neutral arbiter standing above the conflict and competition between individuals and/ or groups and representing the common good, that is the interests of civil society as a whole. In particular, for classical liberals and pluralists alike, ‘the good state is one which maximizes freedom’.40 Thus the basic function of the state is to secure conditions in which individuals and groups can pursue their diverse goals. The characterization of the economic sphere in terms of voluntary cooperation through exchange between individuals sustains the conception of the state as an independent structure acting for the public. Economic power and conflicts of interest do not influence state power since the economy is not analysed in these terms. Individuals pursue their own conception of the good within the private sphere of civil society, and particularly through economic activity in the market. The market reconciles self-interest and the common good through the responsiveness of producers to consumer preferences. Thus in securing economic freedom the state represents the common good. In contrast the Marxist characterization of capitalism in terms of economic power and class conflict provides a conceptual framework for analysing the relationship between economics and politics and, more specifically, between state power and economic power. In this view the formal institutional differentiation of ‘state’ and ‘society’ does not create conditions for the independence of the state from civil society but, in fact, conceals the subordination of political to economic power. Or, in other words, economic determination of the ‘legal and political superstructure’. The general claim is that, far from acting as a neutral arbiter of conflicts in civil society representing the common good, the state is a means of class domination – a capitalist state. Far from securing maximum freedom for all the capitalist state sustains the unfreedoms of the working class which were discussed earlier. For Miller the causal mechanisms whereby political power is deeply embedded in capitalist social relations and linked to capitalist class interests so that ‘basic developments in government policy . . . are in the interests of one class, the bourgeoisie’ mean that, in the classical Marxist conception, the state is ‘a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’.41
Keeping the state in check David Held has argued that Marxism is characterized by ‘scepticism about economic power’ and this is a way of distinguishing it from
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liberalism with its characteristic ‘scepticism about political power’.42 This means that for Marxists economic power, and for liberals political power, is the principal obstacle or threat to the realization of the ‘principle of autonomy’. Although liberalism is characterized as a ‘common good’ theory of the state its scepticism about political power arises from the potential for the state as a system of rule intended to protect liberty to become itself the prime threat to liberty. Thus a central theme of liberal theory is the need to keep the state in check. This explains the close association between liberalism and the constitutional theory of the state, understood as ‘a theory first and foremost of limitation’.43 As Gray puts it, ‘the sine qua non of the liberal state . . . is that governmental power and authority be limited by a system of constitutional rules and practices in which individual liberty and the equality of persons under the rule of law are respected’.44 The failure to take economic power seriously derives from the characterization of markets as systems of voluntary exchange and ‘as “powerless” mechanisms of co-ordination’.45 This does not mean, of course, that liberals are not at all concerned with the exercise of power in the market. For example liberal principles are consistent with, and may demand, regulation of the market to tackle monopoly power or prevent discrimination. But these are essentially remediable flaws or ‘imperfections’ in the operation of markets, and questions of economic power are not seen as connected in a basic way to the constitution of the market order. In contrast in the Marxist view the exercise of economic power inheres in the economic structure of capitalist society. Capitalist class relations just are relations of effective control or power, and the realization of freedom requires transformation of the economic structure. In Held’s view the counterpart of this preoccupation with economic power is a failure to take political power seriously as a potential threat to individual autonomy. There are complex issues involved here, but it seems clear that Held’s claim is not true in any simple sense. It is true that whereas liberalism deploys state-centred arguments to explain the growth of the state and highlights its negative impact, the societycentred thrust of Marxist theorizing tends to emphasize the limits to independent action by state power. Underlying state power Marxists see the constraining or shaping influence of economic power. And yet Marxism does of course take the state seriously as a means of class domination, as a guarantor of capitalist economic power that will have to be confronted in the revolutionary transformation of the relations of production.
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The focus of Held’s criticism is the centralized bureaucratic state characteristic of ‘really existing socialism’. It might be argued that this experience highlights the failure of Marxism to recognize, with liberalism, the need to keep the state in check and a too-simple notion of the withering away of the state after capitalism. In capitalist society the criticism of civil and political rights as merely formal is grounded in the claim that the real constraints on the state emanate from the structure of economic power. The gist of this view is that there is little point worrying about state power in capitalist society or seeking to constrain it by constitutional means when the prime mover is economic power. The notion of the state withering away after capitalism is a way of taking state power seriously because it expresses the idea that ‘state power . . . is in itself a denial of freedom’.46 But it is also a way of avoiding the problem of controlling state power. The problem is that, even on the (optimistic) assumption that the state will (eventually) wither away in a classless society, there will be a longish transition in which ‘a biased apparatus of coercion is needed to consolidate the social transformation of the new society’, that is the dictatorship of the proletariat.47 In this context the very detachment of political power from economic power enlarges the scope for independent action by the state and raises more pressingly the question of the limitation of state power. ‘In particular, Marxists ought to have realistic proposals about how political influence could be dispersed while a complex modern economy is co-ordinated, and about how government can deal effectively with class struggle without itself becoming a ruling class’.48 In other words if Marxists have good reasons to be sceptical above all about economic power in capitalism, after capitalism they should be sceptical about political power.
Relative autonomy of the state In this chapter liberalism has been characterized as a ‘common good’ theory of the state, but also as a theory that is both ‘for and against’ the state. Scepticism about political power comes from a view of the state as an independent structure with its own interests which may pose a potent threat to liberty and a liberal social order. This is reflected in the limited, constitutional model of the state, and also in statist or statecentred accounts of the growth of the state. In contrast Marxism has been presented as a class theory of the state. Its scepticism about economic power comes from an account of the determining role of the economic realm in relation to state power. The Marxist notion of the capitalist state is based on an essentially
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society-centred account of the state. David Held has criticized both perspectives as one-sided: ‘if liberalism’s central failure is to see markets as ‘powerless’ mechanisms of coordination and, thus, to neglect the distorting nature of economic power . . . , Marxism’s central failure is the reduction of political power to economic power and, thus, the neglect of the dangers of centralized political power’.49 Put simply, liberalism tends to overestimate and Marxism to underestimate the autonomy of state power. In fact Marxism is not a reductionist theory. However the concept of the ‘relative autonomy’ of the state, which answers the charge of reductionism, is ambiguous between: • state power, understood just as a point of reference, is the effect of multiple (economic and non-economic) determinations; and, • state power is not simply a point of reference but is itself to be understood as a principle of explanation, with the state understood as an autonomous subject with its own interests and capacity for independent action. The argument for seeing the state as a subject with its own interests and capable of exercising power seems compelling. For Miliband state power lies in the institutions of the state and ‘is wielded . . . by the people who occupy the leading positions in each of these institutions . . . the state elite. . . . [T]he state elite . . . does wield state power’.50 If the state has its own interests and these are not necessarily the same as the interests of the capitalist class or the needs of capital then a Marxist theory of the state has to deal with two opposing explanatory principles. State power cannot be understood as simply the effect of society-centred (class or non-class) social forces but as the outcome of these forces coming up against the self-interested capacity for independent action of the state itself. If economic primacy is to be sustained (economic determination outweighs or overrides independent action by state power) then economic determination must take the form of demonstrating effective constraints which the economic structure imposes on the autonomy of the state.
Notes 1. David Held, Political Theory and the Modern State (Cambridge, Polity, 1989) p. 163. 2. R. N. Berki, The Genesis of Marxism (London, Dent, 1988). 3. Held, Political Theory and the Modern State (note 1), pp. 164, 165. 4. John Hoffman, Beyond the State (Cambridge, Polity, 1995) p. 97.
Marxism, Liberalism and State Theory 159 5. John Gray, Liberalism (Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1986) p. 81. 6. Quoted in Martin Carnoy, The State and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1984) p. 49. 7. Martin Carnoy, The State and Political Theory (note 6), p. 47. 8. Patrick Dunleavy and Brendan O’Leary, Theories of the State. The Politics of Liberal Democracy (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1987) p. 320. Here it should be noted that pluralist theory sees the primary social entities as groups, though even here groups may be understood as expressions of individual preferences. 9. Ibid. p. 320. 10. At least in theory. The experience of ‘really existing socialism’ clearly presents a serious empirical challenge to the theory of the withering away of the state. 11. Gray, Liberalism (note 5), p. 62. 12. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1954) p. 21. 13. John Gray endorses this argument from Hayek, Liberalism (note 5), p. 66. 14. Welfare capitalism does not alter this basic reality for ‘it stops short of giving those citizens without property incomes the right to choose whether or not to sell their labour-power for their subsistence. It therefore requires (and if necessary compels) all those without substantial property to work for the common good. To this extent, the cooperation of the working class is not voluntary; it is compulsory’. Bill Jordan, The State. Authority and Autonomy (Oxford, Blackwell, 1985) p. 9. 15. Norman Barry, An Introduction to Modern Political Theory (London, Macmillan, 1981); Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, 1962). 16. Friedman, ibid. pp. 25–7. 17. Gray, Liberalism (note 5), p. 75. 18. John Stuart Mill, quoted in Jordan, The State (note 14), p. 76. 19. Gray, Liberalism (note 5), p. 75. 20. Ibid. pp. 80–81. 21. Barry, An Introduction to Modern Political Theory (note 15). 22. John Stuart Mill’s ‘circle around every individual human being, which no government . . . ought to be permitted to overstep’, quoted in Jordan, The State (note 14), p. 76. 23. P. Dunleavy and B. O’Leary, Theories of the State. The Politics of Liberal Democracy (London, Macmillan, 1987) p. 72. 24. See P. Dunleavy, Democracy, Bureaucracy and Public Choice (Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) for a critical survey of this literature. 25. W. Niskanen, Bureaucracy: Servant or Master? (Institute for Economic Affairs, 1973). 26. As Jessop puts it ‘extra-economic coercion is not required for appropriating surplus labour because it is, in fact, secured through a formally free and equal exchange between capital and labour’. State Theory. Putting Capitalist States in their Place (Cambridge, Polity, 1990) p. 83. 27. Carnoy, The State and Political Theory (note 7), p. 50. 28. In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels assert that ‘Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another’ (The Communist Manifesto. A Modern Edition, London, Verso) p. 61.
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29.
30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.
37.
38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.
In this classical formulation ‘the State’s primary means of expression is through institutionalized coercive power’ (Carnoy (note 7), p. 56). James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York, St Martin’s Press, 1973); Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State (London, Hutchinson, 1984); Paul Wetherly, ‘The “Needs of Capital” and State Theory’, Studies in Marxism 3, 1997. Ian Gough, The Political Economy of the Welfare State (London, Macmillan, 1979). Norman Ginsburg, Class, Capital and Social Policy (London, Macmillan, 1979) p. 2. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1954) p. 283. Ben Fine and Laurence Harris, ‘State Expenditure and Advanced Capitalism. A Critique’, New Left Review 98, 1976. Ian Gough, The Political Economy of the Welfare State (London, Macmillan, 1979). Bob Jessop, State Theory. Putting Capitalist States in their Place (Cambridge, Polity, 1990) pp. 85–91. The famous claim which supports an instrumentalist conception is that ‘the bourgeoisie has . . . conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 37. Ralph Miliband characterizes this as the ‘primary view’ of the state in Marx, ‘Marx and the State’, in Socialist Register (London, Merlin Press, 1965) p. 283. An influential argument along these lines has been developed by Fred Block. The contribution of Block’s ideas to the development of contemporary Marxist state theory is discussed in M. Carnoy, The State and Political Theory (note 6) and by Colin Hay, ‘Marxism and the State’, in Andrew Gamble et al. (eds), Marxism and Social Science (London, Macmillan, 1999). David Held, Political Theory and the Modern State (note 1), p. 33. Carnoy, The State and Political Theory (note 6), p. 11. Andrew Vincent, Theories of the State (Oxford, Blackwell, 1987) p. 196. Richard W. Miller, ‘Democracy and Class Dictatorship’, in Ellen Frankel Paul et al. (eds) Marxism and Liberalism (Oxford, Blackwell, 1986) pp. 60–64. Held, Political Theory and the Modern State (note 1), p. 166. Vincent, Theories of the State (note 40), p. 77. Gray, Liberalism (note 5), p. 75. Held, Political Theory and the Modern State (note 1), p. 166. Richard W. Miller, ‘Democracy and Class Dictatorship’ (note 41), p. 64. Ibid. p. 66. Ibid. p. 67. Held, Political Theory and the Modern State (note 1), p. 166. Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London, Quartet, 1973) pp. 50–51.
8 Class Struggle and Revolution in Eastern Europe: The Case of Poland Rick Simon
Introduction The concept of revolution lies at the very heart of Marx’s theory of social change, and the need for a revolutionary transformation of capitalist society has historically constituted the dividing wall between Marxists and reformist social democrats. And yet, despite the euphoria accompanying the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of ‘Stalinism’ in Eastern Europe, the response to 1989 in terms of Marxist analysis has been strangely muted. This contrasts with the stream of analysis produced by Western political scientists, who have generally subsumed the revolutions under the broader heading of ‘transitions to democracy’, creating in the process the new subdiscipline of ‘transitology’.1 Among the various currents on the left, the state capitalist and world systems argument that 1989 represented ‘political revolutions’ from one form of capitalism to another, has probably been articulated in the most detail.2 It is true to say that, because of the rapidity of events, the discussion soon shifted from the causes of the revolutions to their significance in terms of the future of Marxism,3 and is now concentrated understandably on the processes of economic transformation and the prospects for rebuilding a democratic socialist movement. The dearth of material on 1989 is, however, in marked contrast to the tremendous volume of analysis which accompanied, for example, the 1968 ‘revolution’ in France, which despite its undoubted significance, did not result in a comparable systemic change. It is also short-sighted in that comprehending the processes at work now cannot be totally separated from the processes which engendered the collapse of the Communist regimes in the first place. 161
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This chapter examines Marx’s theory of revolution in the context of the collapse of communism in Poland. It argues that these events do indeed constitute a ‘revolution’ in the Marxist sense, that is the transition from one set of production relations to another, and from one ruling class to another. I also wish to argue that the dynamic of ‘class struggle’, that is conflict between social classes and strata over the control and distribution of the social surplus, was primarily responsible for the change of regime.
Marx’s theory of revolution It has frequently been observed that Marx did not leave a clear-cut exposition of his theory of revolution and that, in his analyses of the transformation of society from one mode of production to another, he placed varying emphases on the role of class struggle and the contradiction between the forces and relations of production. It is the latter interpretation which has been most widely accepted by both Marxists and non-Marxist commentators. The main source for this particular view is the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy which states succinctly, ‘At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production . . . From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution’.4 The defence by G. A. Cohen of this interpretation of Marx’s theory of history has at its heart precisely the longer passage from which this quote is taken.5 The danger of this view is that it is easily reduced to a form of technological determinism, which posits a progressive and almost autonomous development of the productive forces, behind which political and class relations must fall in line. Class struggle plays an important but essentially secondary role, facilitating the emergence of new relations of production. Such an interpretation I would argue is central to the state capitalist and world systems approaches to 1989. For Callinicos and Harman the revolutions were the result of the obsolescence of the model of capital accumulation adopted by the post-1945 regimes.6 From a world-systems perspective, Christopher Chase-Dunn states explicitly that ‘the big political changes are largely a matter of the superstructure catching up with the economic base’.7 This interpretation counterposes a schema of societal development to the analysis of real historical processes. An alternative reading of Marx, however, provides a much more
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fruitful approach to the problem of historical change. Paradoxically, this alternative is to be found in, perhaps, Marx and Engels’s most famous line: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’.8 In this interpretation, the key to the emergence of classes and class struggle is the development of a social surplus product and who controls its appropriation and distribution. Draper argues that classes ‘must be defined in relation to surplus production, and specifically in relation to control over the appropriation of the surplus product’.9 This notion is reinforced by de Ste Croix who argues that ‘class is a relationship of exploitation’.10 Katz agrees: ‘class is quintessentially a mode of exploitation. Its directing motive is the extraction of surplus labor’.11 In this conception, class conflict ‘is essentially the fundamental relationship between classes, involving exploitation and resistance to it, but not necessarily either class consciousness or collective activity in common’.12 Far from developing a general model of historical development based on the resolution of contradictions between the forces and relations of production, Marx was acutely sensitive to the specificities of different modes of production. This in no sense deprives Marxism of a methodology with which to analyse specific societies or their transitions for, as Ellen Wood emphasises, the key to the development of a mode of production and its transition to another ‘is to be found in the specific mode of productive activity . . . the specific form in which surplus labour was pumped out of the direct producers, and the class conflict surrounding that process of surplus-extraction’.13 For those who advocate the primacy of the conflict between the forces and relations of production, a contradiction emerges when the relations of production prevent the development of the forces of production. When this occurs the relations of production must change in order to allow the forces of production to develop. As Wood has noted, however, viewed historically, there has been no necessary imperative for the forces of production to develop; in fact, in certain periods, the forces of production have stagnated if not regressed.14 If the struggle over the expropriation of the social surplus is primary, Katz argues, a contradiction emerges in a mode of production when the uses of surplus product individuals must make to defend their class position undermine the development of the forces of production; or, inversely, when the necessary investments of surplus they must make to maintain the productive forces impair their class power. Contradictory imperatives in the process of surplus appropriation undermine the preconditions of the process itself.15
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Overcoming such a contradiction, however, requires specific conditions. The struggle between exploiters and exploited within a mode of production does not necessarily lead to the emergence of another mode of production. The fundamental exploitative relationship under feudalism was between the landowners and the peasantry but, while the latter was responsible for decisively undermining the class rule of the former, this conflict in itself did not lead to the emergence of a new mode of production. It is only when conditions develop for the emergence of a class based on new property forms and a new mode of exploitation, which prove more productive, that a new mode of production begins to develop. Thus the emergence of a new mode of production derives from the struggle, for example between the feudal aristocracy and the rising bourgeoisie, of different classes based on conflicting and mutually exclusive modes of exploitation.16 Such a struggle culminated, in the cases of Britain and France, in revolution and the overthrow of the political structures defending the old order, facilitating the development of the new mode of production. Revolution is thus a political act in so far as it destroys the existing structures of the state but a social act insofar as it creates the conditions for the development of an alternative mode of production. Inherent in the argument allocating primacy to the contradiction between the forces and relations of production is the notion that the outcome is virtually preordained. The outcome of the struggle between classes, on the other hand, while taking place within certain structural constraints, is by no means certain. In this paper I will utilize the class struggle approach to analyse the collapse of the Communist regime in Poland in 1989. This will be done in the following way: first, I will identify the specificity of class relations in Eastern Europe in terms of the production and control of the surplus product and its impact on political structures; second, I will trace the emergence of a contradiction in the mode of exploitation in Poland and how this affected the strategies and goals of contending forces and impacted on the political system; third, I will indicate how the mode of exploitation was fatally undermined and the regime collapsed.
Class structure in Eastern Europe During the late 1940s, the social system and, consequently, the class structure of the East European states was fundamentally transformed. Wasilewski and Wnuk-Lipinski have suggested that, in Poland’s case, as a result of both Nazi and Soviet action ‘[t]hree social classes virtually
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disappeared’: the bourgeoisie and big landowners, the predominantly Jewish petty bourgeoisie, and the intelligentsia.17 While there is some debate as to the timetable envisaged for sovietization (different versions were espoused by different factions within the indigenous Communist parties), the prolonged maintenance of capitalist systems in Eastern Europe was not a viable option if Soviet domination was to be maintained. Capitalism operated according to different economic principles, generated different and potentially hostile social forces and provided a gateway for the pressures of the global capitalist system on the Soviet economy. The East European Communist regimes came into existence, therefore, as a consequence of the confrontation between two antagonistic social systems: Soviet-style ‘socialism’ and Western capitalism. Frank’s argument that the USSR and Eastern Europe were constituent elements of the global capitalist economy and that the existence of two world systems was ‘an optical illusion’ is fundamentally erroneous.18 While it is true to say that they did not operate in hermetically-sealed compartments they did have different class relations, different economic mechanisms and different dynamics, and Eastern Europe’s relations with the global capitalist economy were mediated and strictly controlled by the state. While there is no space here to go into all aspects of the debate concerning the class nature of Soviet-type societies, which so exercised various currents of Marxist thought up to the collapse of the USSR, some discussion of the specific relations of production and class structure of the East European states is essential if we are to be able to apply Marx’s method to the processes of transformation. In this respect, the following features appear the most salient: 1. Private ownership of the means of production was abolished and a central plan established to allocate resources and investment to economic units; this is a crucial distinction between Soviet-type systems and capitalism for, rather than being determined by relative profitability and competitive markets (the law of value), allocation of resources was determined politically by a process of bargaining between economic units and the central planners. 2. Political and economic priorities were determined by the dominant political institution, the Communist Party (frequently renamed in Eastern Europe to reflect the forcible incorporation of rival socialdemocratic parties). 3. The party controlled, in an extremely hierarchical fashion, the allocation of personnel to all key positions in both the party itself and the
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state through the nomenklatura system;19 privileges were attached to membership of the nomenklatura strictly in accordance with one’s level in the hierarchy. Advancement up this hierarchy and thus access to political influence was not a product of autonomous economic power generated through private ownership of the means of production as under capitalism, but of political relationships. There was little scope, at least under the classic Stalinist system, for any private accumulation of wealth and even where this was possible it could not be employed as capital to generate further surplus value. Moreover, because political power was not grounded in actual juridical ownership of the means of production it could not easily be transmitted to future generations, thus ensuring continuity of class rule. As Trotsky had observed in respect of the Soviet Union, the nomenklatura was not a class but a ‘parasitic’ social stratum which gained significant material privileges from its control of the social surplus, but was incapable of expropriating the surplus directly from the producers through economic methods in the manner of a capitalist class.20 The nomenklatura was thus primarily concerned with preserving its political power and attendant privileges, rather than developing the forces of production. While the system was working comparatively well, the nomenklatura displayed a certain collective identity. Once the system began to deteriorate, however, the heterogeneous nature of the nomenklatura was revealed through the contradictory strategies which emerged to halt the decline and preserve its grip on political power. 4. The regime presented itself ideologically as the guardian of the interests of the working class, whose formation the regime actively promoted through rapid industrialization. The regime could only reproduce itself through recruitment from other social strata, primarily the working class, and thus depended for its very existence on the support or at least acquiescence of workers, undermining attempts to create its own hegemony. Contrary to the top-down model of Soviet-type societies promoted by theorists of totalitarianism, the nomenklatura could only retain political power by accommodating to workers’ interests on the one hand, while seeking to fragment and disrupt any attempts at workers’ autonomous organization on the other. In an important sense, therefore, the nomenklatura was a weak ruling elite promoting policies, frequently referred to as a ‘social contract’, which included a commitment to full employment, low prices, free social services and a steadily improving standard of living. Maintaining the social contract consumed an ever greater proportion of the social surplus and undoubtedly contributed to growing economic difficulties.
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5. Dynamism was initially imparted to economic development because massive resources were devoted to postwar reconstruction and industrialization, turning peasants into workers in newly built factories (usually referred to as ‘extensive’ industrialization). Once the pool of potential surplus labour was substantially diminished and reliance was placed on increasing productivity to promote growth, the nomenklatura proved incapable of developing the productive forces in the same dynamic way, precipitating a steady decline in economic performance. Kennedy and Bialecki argue that the very structure of relations within the elite promoted stagnation. The client-patron relations which emerged (what they call, with a deliberate reference to feudalism, ‘vassalage’) encouraged the rejection of responsibility at lower levels of the hierarchy, reducing ‘the collective power of the authorities, as the ruling group does not have an effective instrument through which it can realize its goals’.21 The latter inevitably squeezed the ability of the nomenklatura to meet its objectives, forcing it to make strategic choices about how best to maintain its rule. In this process it came into conflict with the interests of other social strata, especially industrial workers, but also, crucially, generating conflict within itself. The search for strategies in worsening circumstances was complicated by the opening up of some of the East European economies to the pressures of the global capitalist economy during the 1970s. Borrowing from the West created linkages between sections of the nomenklatura and global capitalism and opportunities for self-enrichment but, at the same time, narrowed the regimes’ options as the debt burden contributed to the deterioration of economic performance. I will now turn to the specific case of the collapse of the Communist regime in Poland. I will argue that, in its attempts to develop a strategy for the maintenance of its political rule during the 1970s, the nomenklatura provoked major class struggles, which undermined its general hold on political power, but at the same time created the conditions for sections of the nomenklatura to seek a path towards capitalism in order to consolidate their social position and power.
The collapse of communism in Poland Class struggle and Gierek’s strategy After definitively gaining power in 1947, the Communist regime displayed a certain sensitivity to the Polish cultural heritage, attempting to establish its legitimacy through claiming to defend Polish interests,
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particularly in alliance with the Soviet Union against potential German revanchism, promoting an economic programme of industrialization and modernization, defending secular, liberal values against Catholic social conservatism while, at the same time, acknowledging the affinity of the Polish people to the Catholic Church and seeking a modus vivendi with the Church hierarchy.22 The latter was accomplished following the Polish ‘October’ of 1956, when the Gomulka regime briefly liberalized the Polish political and economic system, including decollectivization of agriculture.23 By 1970, however, support for the Gomulka regime was in sharp decline as it had become one of the most conservative in Eastern Europe, crushing student unrest, instigating an anti-semitic purge of intellectuals, and becoming a prime mover in the crushing of the 1968 ‘Prague Spring’. On the economic front, the dynamism engendered by industrialization was petering out and output and productivity were declining. The nomenklatura was faced with a dilemma: how could the social surplus be increased without undermining its hold on political power? The Gomulka regime’s response was to ignore workers’ interests in favour of generating more surplus by crudely increasing prices on basic foodstuffs, on the assumption that workers would simply acquiesce in the decline in living standards. Raising prices has, however, proved a dangerous tactic whenever it has been implemented in Soviettype societies: such rises hit everybody simultaneously as well as undermining the regime’s own propaganda concerning its defence of workers’ interests. In Poland, the maintenance of low prices (through subsidizing agriculture and inefficient state enterprises) and the other elements of the social contract, especially full employment, were considered virtually constitutional rights.24 Workers in Poland’s big shipyards responded with strikes and demonstrations, sacking the local party headquarters in Gdansk. The regime met this upsurge of resistance with violence, killing several workers. Nevertheless, the sight of workers openly in confrontation with the regime prompted the latter to make surprisingly swift and sweeping concessions, revealing the extent to which the regime was dependent upon working-class support and the limits to open repression of largescale resistance. The most startling development was the removal of Gomulka as party leader. His replacement, Eduard Gierek, promoted himself as a leader of working-class stock (he was an ex-miner), whose base was the major coal-mining region of Silesia. Gierek revoked the price increases and insisted on negotiating face-to-face with strikers in Szczecin and Gdansk. He insisted that the regime would raise living
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standards and improve communications with the working class to avoid any future conflict. After this setback, the regime was still faced with the problem of increasing the surplus. The reaction to increased prices had indicated that to challenge key elements of the ‘social contract’ in pursuance of improved productivity could provoke a social explosion. Gierek therefore embarked upon a two-pronged strategy: on the one hand, reinforcing the power of the party and, on the other, embarking on a sweeping programme of industrial modernization. Reinforcing the power of the party (Polish United Workers’ Party – PUWP) involved purging its ranks of the Gomulka old guard and potential political opponents, bringing in more pragmatic technocratic elements to replace them, and radically improving the party’s feedback mechanism by, firstly, creating direct links between the Central Committee and 164 key industrial enterprises and, secondly, by targeting industrial workers for party membership. The latter measure led to a growth in party membership from 2.3 million in 1970 to just over 3 million by 1979. Manual workers as a percentage of party membership rose over the same period from 40.3 per cent to 46.1 per cent; 17 per cent of all workers in the state sector belonged to the party.25 Between the mid-1960s and the end of the 1970s, the number of skilled workers in Polish industry increased dramatically from around 600,000 to around 2.5 million, of whom 18 per cent were party members by 1979.26 Nevertheless, the party leadership remained firmly in the hands of a new generation of nomenklatura apparatchiks, who had rather more interest in their own power and privileges than in ideology.27 The second element of Gierek’s strategy derived from the realization that increasing the domestic surplus through squeezing workers’ living standards was a non-starter. The regime, therefore, set about obtaining a ‘surrogate’ surplus by borrowing from the West in order to undertake an ambitious strategy of industrial modernization. Such a strategy was possible because of the more relaxed atmosphere of détente but represented the rejection of an important element of regime dogma concerning relations with the capitalist states. This move, in turn, facilitated the downgrading of ideology within the party.28 The basic idea of the opening to the West was to use the credit to retool Polish industry, thus improving productivity and the quality of output to produce goods which could be sold back to the West in return for hard currency with which to pay off the initial loans. Such was the scale of technological modernization that, by 1975, almost 50 per cent of the means of production had been introduced during 1971–75.29
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Coupled with other reforms, the impact of Gierek’s changes to the party was contradictory and ultimately disastrous for the regime. On the one hand, the changes complemented the economic strategy as the promotion of technocratic elements was essential if full use was to be made of the new technology. On the other hand, reform of Poland’s local government system in 1973–75, which substantially increased the number of administrative units, and reorganization of the industrial ministries by amalgamating enterprises into much larger conglomerates, also served to strengthen technocratic elements by weakening local party supervision of enterprises within their region.30 The management of the new conglomerates was able to circumvent the central party apparatus and deal directly with Western companies, initiating a breach of the state monopoly of foreign trade, and creating opportunities for corrupt self-enrichment. The impact of the strategy on the working class was also contradictory. On the one hand, workers’ confidence in their ability to affect regime policy was reinforced during the early 1970s. In a major departure from its usual practice, the regime permitted strikes, although illegal, to take place, generally bringing them to a swift conclusion through concessions.31 In addition, the average worker’s standard of living increased by 75 per cent during 1971–79, real wages increasing by 50 per cent. Kolankiewicz argues that much of this increase was due, however, not so much to a general increase in wage rates as in bonuses, premiums, and rewards awarded at the discretion of management and utilized by them to avoid industrial conflict by buying off sections of workers, or solving problems of supply.32 The reality of what was happening to the role of the party also undermined the drive to attract industrial workers into membership and revealed to the party’s proletarian core the increasing impotence of the local party apparatus.33 Unfortunately for the regime, in opening up to the West the economy became exposed to the pressures of the global capitalist economy. In 1973–74 the capitalist world was hit by major increases in oil prices, exacerbating the consequences of the end of the postwar boom. As a result of this crisis of overproduction and rapidly rising energy costs, western markets could not accommodate Polish goods, scuppering a vital component of Gierek’s strategy. In addition, the price of Soviet oil, although still below the world market price, increased by 131 per cent in 1975, forcing much greater exports to the USSR to pay for it.34 Thereafter, the relationship to the global capitalist economy was to have a major impact on strategies for the maintenance of political power.
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The consequences of increasing indebtedness and diminishing markets impelled the regime to try a new round of price increases in 1976. As in 1970, these were met by a wave of strikes, this time in central Poland. Once again, after some initial repression of worker activists, the regime caved in and withdrew the rises. The consequences of these actions were, however, far-reaching. Unlike in 1970, when workers on the Baltic coast had been both geographically and, more importantly, socially isolated, the 1976 strikes gained the support of wide sectors of Polish society. Intellectuals established the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR) to defend workers against victimization by the state in the aftermath of the strikes, in the process creating a network of activists who produced an illegal but widely distributed newspaper, Robotnik (‘Worker’). Among worker-activists, the goal of establishing trade unions independent of the party-state, which could actually defend workers in struggle, became increasingly popular. Industrial workers and sections of the intelligentsia were thus becoming more and more disenchanted with the regime, threatening the stability of its social base. The rise and fall of Solidarity The years 1980–81 represent the peak of the class struggle in Poland with the emergence of the mass movement Solidarity. These years also represent a watershed for the regime: its linchpin, the party, was irreparably damaged, both organizationally and ideologically, and in trying to escape from the burgeoning political and economic crisis, the regime strengthened those elements antagonistic to the maintenance of nationalized property relations. By 1980, both domestic and external environments had changed substantially from the beginning of the 1970s. Poland’s net foreign debt, following a new round of borrowing, stood at about $23 billion,35 making the government ‘even more dependent economically on the West’, and producing considerable concern in Moscow.36 The election in 1978 of a Polish Pope, John Paul II (formerly archbishop Karol Wojtyla from Krakow), strengthened the organizational linkages between the comparatively autonomous Polish Catholic Church and the Vatican, and provided an alternative ideological focus to Soviet-style communism, factors evident in the Pope’s visit to Poland in 1979, which drew massive crowds. Domestically, gross domestic product was declining but the regime strove to protect the population from deteriorating circumstances by diverting resources from heavy industry to consumer goods.37
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Additionally, the PUWP had revealed a less than united front at its eighth congress in February 1980. Gierek’s policies had generated an internal opposition but he insisted that the strategy of dynamic economic growth was the correct one and would be continued.38 The congress saw the removal from the Politburo of leading hardliner Stefan Olszowski and Prime Minister Piotr Jaroszewicz, who were blamed for some of the regime’s economic problems. In 1980, therefore, the conditions were ripening for a much greater explosion than before. As in 1970 and 1976, the detonator for the wave of strikes in summer 1980 was price increases. The extent of the crisis within Polish communism can be discerned from the fact that PUWP activists and even officials were responsible for spreading the strike.39 The strategy of sit-in strikes in the bastions of Polish industry also made it difficult for the regime to suppress the discontent: the reliability of the police and troops in the event of a full-scale confrontation was questionable, and clashes at the workplace threatened not only loss of life but also considerable damage to newly-purchased equipment.40 In such conditions the party was forced to negotiate with the strikers. This time, demands for the rescinding of the increases and for wage rises rapidly turned into political demands for the recognition of Solidarity as an autonomous trade union movement. Different sets of demands emerged from different regions but common threads can be discerned. Solidarity’s perspective was essentially that of asserting working-class control over the economy rather than its transformation. In the programme adopted at its First National Congress in September 1981, the central demand of factory self-management was considered ‘an effective means of ejecting the nomenklatura from their positions of authority, that is, as a political instrument rather than a comprehensive strategy of economic reform’.41 Solidarity also expressed egalitarian demands, not for the complete eradication of wage differentials but for these to be related to individual effort and to be transparent. The aim of the struggle was, therefore, a change in the relations of authority but not in the relations of property. The emergence of Solidarity as an alternative power-centre reinforced the profound crisis within the PUWP. ‘The party was essentially leaderless as the government acquiesced in the Szczecin and Gdansk agreements at the end of August [1980].’42 As the party leadership sought to reorient itself, Olszowski was reelected to the Politburo and, shortly afterwards, Gierek was replaced as leader by Stanislaw Kania, ostensibly on the grounds of the former’s deteriorating health.43 The large worker membership of the PUWP ensured that Solidarity’s influence extended
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deep into its ranks, producing demands for the democratization of the party, which were expressed in the so-called ‘horizontal structures movement’, which sought to link party organizations at grass-roots level cutting across the traditional top-down hierarchy. The impact of the movement within the party and of Solidarity outside was graphically illustrated at the July 1981 party congress. Election of congress delegates was carried out in an unprecedentedly democratic fashion eliminating many local party officials, and at the congress itself delegates elected a Central Committee almost totally different from its predecessor. Out went almost any holder of an official position above the level of the enterprise. Nevertheless, the rank-and-file movement was in a minority at the congress and Kania was overwhelmingly re-elected first secretary. Now, however, he presided over a party whose leadership was both highly inexperienced and unpredictable, a tendency confirmed the following October when it voted to replace Kania with General Wojciech Jaruzelski.44 Despite, or perhaps because of, the impact of the horizontal structures movement the PUWP had been haemorrhaging members, particularly among workers, at an increasing rate, indicating both a profound loss of faith in the party’s capacity to change and a new-found loyalty to Solidarity. The party’s fragmentation and the radicalization of Solidarity towards the end of 1981, coupled with the decline of the moderate faction around Walesa, despite his narrow election as leader of Solidarity at its congress in September, provoked a profound political crisis and a situation of dual power. Faced with the potential collapse of a key component of its control in Eastern Europe, the Soviet leadership indicated that it would not remain a passive bystander. To resolve the crisis and prevent Soviet intervention, which would have produced considerable bloodshed and a potential Western military response, Jaruzelski decided to bypass the dangerously unreliable party altogether. Simultaneously occupying the posts of party first secretary, prime minister, minister of defence and head of the armed forces, Jaruzelski was able to unify the key functions of the party and state and utilize the only institution comparatively untouched by events – the army. Martial law, crisis and collapse The imposition of martial law painted a veneer of stability over the twin assaults taking place on the foundations of the ‘Communist’ system in Poland: the collapse of the PUWP as an authoritative institution, and the undermining of the planned economy. Briefly, the fundamental factors leading to the regime’s collapse in 1989 were as follows.
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1. The utilization of the Polish military in December 1981 was a clear indication that the party as an institution could no longer effectively represent the interests of the nomenklatura. In the aftermath of the imposition of martial law, power was shifted away from the party to the institutions of the state, especially parliament (Sejm).45 As the traditional system changed so the PUWP became increasingly factionalized, a reformist current emerging which promoted the interests of the increasingly autonomous enterprise management. 2. Economically, the options for the regime were narrowing. A trade embargo was initiated by the West in response to the introduction of martial law, restricting access to Western technology and markets. To tackle the worsening conditions, a programme of economic reform, based on a package elaborated by Solidarity intellectuals in 1981, was initiated. This envisaged a shift to enterprise self-management and the development of market relations between them, thus downgrading the role of the plan. Reform both diminished party control over the economy, and facilitated the emergence of a dynamic private sector which was the primary motor of economic growth during the 1980s. The private sector was a response to the big shortages and, consequently, big opportunities for corrupt and illegal activity. Kennedy and Bialecki suggest that, during the 1980s, a ‘generalized market’ emerged where goods and services in short supply were bought and sold and which utilised a variety of ‘currencies’ but was ‘not based on the exchange of money’.46 This had two important effects: first, it undermined the nomenklatura’s control over the distribution of goods, services and incomes; and, second, it promoted the search for a new universal equivalent in the form of hard currency and, especially, dollars. Those who held dollars gained increasing power over the market and became more and more tied in to the global capitalist economy. The emergence of a market in itself did not signal the development of capitalism for, crucially, profit was not generated by superior productivity but by the age-old process of ‘buying cheap and selling dear’. Nor did these profits find their way into the production process as they were obtained by virtue of the existence of scarcity and control over supply. 3. The impact of these processes was to change the regime’s social base. The regime sought to re-establish some legitimacy through incorporation of moderate elements of the opposition, including the Catholic Church. This was done by initiating electoral reform, providing a wider choice of candidates, creating space for the emergence of non-political
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organizations, and forming new ‘official’ unions (OPZZ) with greater autonomy than their predecessors.47 Most significantly, the nomenklatura system effectively disintegrated as it represented an area of political uncertainty and constraint on figures whose power was increasingly derived from economic sources.48 4. Opinion polls revealed the extent of disillusionment with the PUWP and with it the project of socialist construction in Poland.49 By 1985, living standards had declined by 20 per cent since 1979, the regime was patently incapable of fulfilling its side of the social contract, and environmental problems were all too obvious in more industrialized regions.50 The Polish working class, still clinging to the egalitarianism expressed in the emergence of Solidarity, and suspicious of privatization, became thoroughly disillusioned with the regime and its ‘socialism’. Driven underground, Solidarity had fragmented and become dominated by the rightward moving faction around Lech Walesa and the liberal intelligentsia. While representing symbolic opposition to the regime, Solidarity ceased in practice to promote the interests of Polish workers, but was, nevertheless, perceived as the focus of opposition to the regime. 5. As in 1970, 1976 and 1980, class struggle was the catalyst of change. In 1987, as the economic situation worsened, the regime sought popular support for radical reform through a referendum. But, despite achieving a majority in favour, it was insufficient to give the regime authority to carry out its reform programme. Its credibility badly damaged, the regime had no alternative to austerity anyway and implemented price rises, provoking a wave of strikes in the spring of 1988. These strikes were not led by Solidarity but by a younger generation of militants who demanded wage increases commensurate with rising prices. In a second round of strikes in August, the strikers’ demands swiftly became political, calling for the relegalization of Solidarity. 6. The other crucial factor concerning change in Poland was the situation in the Soviet Union. In the struggle to implement perestroika, Gorbachev had embarked on a liberalization of the Soviet system. Eastern Europe, which had become a financial burden on the Soviet economy, no longer appeared such a vital asset, and the promotion of reform in Poland would strengthen Gorbachev’s hand against his more conservative opponents. On a visit to Warsaw in July, 1988 in between the two rounds of strikes, Gorbachev encouraged the PUWP’s liberal wing around Prime Minister Rakowski to enter into a dialogue with Solidarity if it was to avoid catastrophe.
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7. The final component of this mosaic, which had a crucial bearing on the manner of the regime’s demise, was a factor which Marxists are often loath to take into account: the regime’s disastrous miscalculations concerning the May 1989 elections to the Sejm and the newly-created Senate. By allowing Solidarity to participate on a restricted basis, the regime assumed it would still gain sufficient support in the new institutions to retain real power while incorporating significant sections of the opposition. It failed to foresee Solidarity’s crushing victory despite the difficulties of organizing an electoral campaign at short notice. The balance of forces in the Sejm was transformed, enabling a Solidarity-led government to emerge for the first time in August of that year. Conclusion I have argued that Marx’s theory of revolution is capable of providing substantial insights into the collapse of the non-capitalist system in Poland. By concentrating on the social relations of production, the way in which the social surplus was controlled, and the struggle between different social forces over its distribution, it is possible to trace the disintegration of the system. While most analyses of the collapse of communism have emphasized the role of the USSR and such factors as the emergence of civil society, I have argued that, central to the process of decline, was the opening of the Polish economy to the influence of global capitalism. When this was coupled with the massive struggles with the Polish working class which culminated in the creation of Solidarity, the central institutions of the Polish state were fatally weakened. During the 1980s, the institutions of the planned economy continued to exercise influence, cutting across the marketizing reforms initiated by the regime: both state industry and (private) agriculture continued to receive substantial subsidies in order to maintain comparatively low prices (although inflation was increasing), keep workers in jobs and avoid social unrest. On the other hand, the decline of centralized control over the economy, renewed contacts with the West after 1985, and the fragmentation of the party-state created the space and the opportunity for the emergence of elements within the nomenklatura, who could see the only guarantee of their continued political power in the transition to a more secure form of surplus extraction in the shape of a full-blown capitalist economy. In marked contrast to the initial transition from feudalism to capitalism in Britain, which depended entirely on the emergence of a domestic capitalist class,51 the Polish economy was being undermined through its
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links to an already existing, and incredibly powerful, global capitalist economy, which presented ready-made alternatives to the existing arrangements. While I would agree with state capitalist and world systems theorists that 1989 represented a political revolution in that power changed hands at the level of the regime, I would argue that a social revolution was also taking place, that the old relations of production had been decisively undermined prior to the downfall of the regime, and that the new Solidarity government almost immediately set about, through the programme of ‘shock therapy’, the rapid dismantling of the remnants of the planned economy in an effort to establish a capitalist system. This revolution has not yet been completed but the old system has been fundamentally transformed.
Notes 1. See, for example, S. P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); P. C. Schmitter and T. L. Karl, ‘The Conceptual Travels of Transitologists and Consolidoligists: How Far to the East Should They Attempt to Go?’, Slavic Review 53/1, 1994, 173–85; R. D. Markwick, ‘A Discipline in Transition?: From Sovietology to “Transitology” ’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 12/3, 1996, 255–76. 2. C. Harman, ‘The storm breaks’, International Socialism 46, 1990, 3–93; A. G. Frank, ‘Revolution in Eastern Europe: Lessons for Democratic Socialist Movements (and Socialists)’, in W. K. Tabb (ed.), The Future of Socialism: Perspectives from the Left (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1990) pp. 87–105; A. G. Frank, ‘Soviet and East European “socialism”: a review of the international political economy on what went wrong’, Review of International Political Economy 1/2, 1994, 317–43. 3. See, for example, the articles in the leading journal of contemporary Marxism, New Left Review (especially issue 193) and also the collection of essays in Tabb (ed.) The Future of Socialism. 4. C.W., Vol. 29, p. 263. 5. G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978). 6. See A. Callinicos, The Revenge of History: Marxism and the East European Revolutions (Cambridge, Polity, 1991) pp. 45–6; Harman, ‘The storm breaks’ (note 2), pp. 44–5. 7. C. Chase-Dunn, ‘Socialism and Capitalism on a World Scale’, in W. K. Tabb (ed.), The Future of Socialism (note 2), pp. 67–86, p. 74. 8. C.W., Vol. 6, p. 482. 9. H. Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution: Volume I: State and Bureaucracy (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1977) p. 14, emphasis in the original. 10. G. de Ste Croix, ‘Class in Marx’s Conception of History, Ancient and Modern’, in New Left Review 146, 1984, 94–111, p. 99.
178 Rick Simon 11. C. Katz, From Feudalism to Capitalism: Marxian Theories of Class Struggle and Social Change (New York, Greenwood Press, 1989) p. 38. 12. G. de Ste Croix, ‘Class in Marx’s Conception of History’ (note 10), p. 100. 13. E. M. Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism. Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995) p. 127. 14. Ibid. pp. 130–31. 15. Katz, From Feudalism to Capitalism (note 11), p. 24. 16. C. J. Katz, ‘Karl Marx on the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism’, Theory and Society 22/3, 1993, 363–89, p. 380. 17. J. Wasilewski and E. Wnuk-Lipinski, ‘Poland: Winding Road from the Communist to the post-Solidarity Elite’, Theory and Society 24, 1995, 669–96, p. 670. 18. A. G. Frank, ‘Soviet and East European “socialism” ’ (note 2), p. 320. 19. For want of a better term I will use ‘nomenklatura’ to denote that section of East European society which held political power. 20. L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? (New York, Pathfinder Press, 1972[1937]) p. 250. 21. M. D. Kennedy and I. Bialecki, ‘Power and the Logic of Distribution in Poland’, East European Politics and Societies 3/2, 1989, 300–28, p. 315. 22. P. Gowan, ‘Poland’s Transition from State Socialism to Capitalism’, in G. Nonneman (ed.), Political and Economic Liberalization: Dynamics and Linkages in Comparative Perspective (Boulder, CO, Lynne Rienner, 1996) pp. 65–100, p. 71. 23. For details of these events, see K. Kersten, ‘1956 – The Turning Point’, in O. A. Westad et al. (eds), The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1945–89 (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1994) pp. 47–62. 24. Gowan, ‘Poland’s Transition’ (note 22), p. 72. 25. G. Kolankiewicz, ‘Poland, 1980: the Working Class under Anomic Socialism’, in J. Triska et al. (eds), Blue-Collar Workers in Eastern Europe (London, George Allan & Unwin, 1981) pp. 136–56, p. 150. 26. J. Piekalkiewicz, ‘Poland: Nonviolent Revolution in a Socialist State’, J. A. Goldstone et al. (eds), Revolutions in the Late Twentieth Century (Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1991) pp. 136–61, p. 151; Kolankiewicz, ‘Poland, 1980’ (note 25), p. 150. 27. Piekalkiewicz, ‘Poland: Nonviolent Revolution’ (note 26), p. 147. 28. K. Z. Poznanski, Poland’s Protracted Transition: Institutional change and economic growth (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996) p. 79. 29. Kolankiewicz, ‘Poland, 1980’ (note 25), pp. 141–2. 30. Poznanski, Poland’s Protracted Transition (note 28), pp. 61–2. 31. Ibid. p. 62. 32. Kolankiewicz, ‘Poland, 1980’ (note 25), p. 141. 33. O. MacDonald, ‘The Polish Vortex: Solidarity and Socialism’, in New Left Review 139, 1983, 5–48, p. 13. 34. Piekalkiewicz, ‘Poland: Nonviolent Revolution’ (note 26), p. 154. 35. B. Kaminski, The Collapse of State Socialism: The Case of Poland (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1991) p. 241. 36. MacDonald, ‘The Polish Vortex’ (note 33), p. 11. 37. Kaminski, The Collapse of State Socialism (note 35), pp. 242–3.
Class Struggle and Revolution in Eastern Europe 179 38. K. J. Lepak, Prelude to Solidarity: Poland and the Politics of the Gierek Regime (New York, Columbia University Press, 1988) pp. 191–3. 39. Gowan, ‘Poland’s Transition’ (note 22), pp. 76–7. 40. Piekalkiewicz, ‘Poland: Nonviolent Revolution’ (note 26), p. 155. 41. A. W. Tymowski, ‘Poland’s Unwanted Social Revolution’, East European Politics and Societies 7/2, 1993, 169–202, p. 186. 42. Lepak, Prelude to Solidarity (note 38), p. 205. 43. Ibid. 44. W. G. Hahn, Democracy in a Communist Party: Poland’s Experience Since 1980 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1987) pp. 144–59. 45. Poznanski, Poland’s Protracted Transition (note 28), pp. 144–5; J. Batt, ‘The end of Communist rule in East-Central Europe: A four-country comparison’, Government & Opposition, Summer 1991, 368–90, p. 374. 46. Kennedy and Bielecki, ‘Power and the Logic of Distribution’ (note 21), pp. 320–21. 47. Poznanski, Poland’s Protracted Transition (note 28), pp. 149–51. 48. Batt, ‘The end of Communist rule’ (note 45), p. 374. 49. Gowan, ‘Poland’s Transition’ (note 22), p. 77. 50. J. F. Brown, Surge to Freedom: The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe (Twickenham, Adamantine Press, 1991) pp. 81–2. 51. See E. M. Wood, ‘The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism’, in Monthly Review 50/3, 1998, 14–31.
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Part 3 Developing Marxist Politics at the Millennium
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9 Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Future Hillel Ticktin
Introduction This chapter discusses the relations between Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement and their relationship, in turn, with the wider socialist movement. In this process, I discuss the nature of the far left and its prospects. The discussion is theoretical and not historical. I have argued elsewhere that the Trotskyist movement became specialists on Trotsky and Trotskyism until the time of Ernest Mandel, who broke through the situation in which the movement had found itself.1 Trotskyists were often seen as mirror images of the Stalinists. They were perceived as dogmatists, inveterate sectarians and so marginal to intellectual and political life that they could be ignored. This was the situation until the 1960s, when the Trotskyist movement changed out of all recognition, becoming in a number of countries the dominant force on the far left.
Trotsky the theorist – ascendant What are the essential components of Trotsky’s thought and what of these were used in the Trotskyist movement? Permanent revolution, the critique of socialism in one country, the description of the Soviet Union, the theory of Russia as semi-Asiatic, the concept of the long wave, the entire conception of revolution described in his History of the Russian Revolution2 are all major contributions both to thought and to Marxism. None the less, Trotsky’s major contribution probably lies in his overall method of analysis. It is this that his followers have tried to copy and which provided the basis of his theoretical innovations. It is not easy 183
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to describe his method as distinct from that of Marx or Lenin but there are clear differences.3 First, Trotsky was more dialectical both in his speeches and in his writing than any Marxist writer since Marx, even down to the present day. He had mastered the dialectic in a way few were capable of doing. The word dialectical has been both mocked at and misused over the last century, most particularly in the ‘Stalinist period’.4 Correctly understood it provides a methodology which is critical of all societies because it seeks the fundamental laws and hence contradictions lying at the base of that society. This involves, inter alia, using the traditional dualities of necessity/accident, essence/appearance, birth/decline and of course the polarities inherent in the term contradiction. Dialectics, from this point of view, is both the science of change and the nature of change itself. Trotsky was no philosopher but he appears to have absorbed much of the core content of dialectics, without direct instruction. He read Hegel and Marx, of course, but few who have read those theorists have mastered their method. He does not seem to have consciously theorized the dialectic. The fragments he wrote, on the subject, while interesting and innovative, are limited in scope and depth.5 Rather he appears to have absorbed it in his thought in a practical form. This is not to say that he was not conscious of his use of the dialectic method. Thus, he argued that ‘. . . Dialectics . . . constitutes the foundation of the Marxist view of the world, the fundamental method of Marxist analysis’.6 He placed it first in his component parts of Marxism, with historical materialism second and political economy third.7 I would argue that Lenin is more didactic and more descriptive in his analysis because his prime interest was in building the party and taking power. Marx, on the other hand, was working on the underlying processes of capitalism and his dialectic appears in a profound and often complex manner. By contrast, Trotsky is analysing contemporary revolution, the decline of capitalism, the nature of a world in transition, all of which are highly complex and inherently and immediately dialectical processes. In other words, a Marxist analysis requires that they be treated dialectically precisely because they are processes of change. Second, his method is shown in the way he sought the fundamental basis of Russian society in its semi-Asiatic political economy, and then, once it became part of the world market, in its dependence on Imperialism. His formulation of that dependence in the concept of permanent revolution and in the law of combined development provided an understanding of the political economy of revolution itself. His work is a logical extension of that of Marx. At the time it was formulated, it was
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innovative, fresh and penetrating. He argues the necessity of certain relationships and their equally necessary evolution or decay. He thus theorizes the real political economy of Russia and capitalism using the dialectical method. This approach led him to argue that the proletariat must carry the banner of the bourgeois democratic revolution forward because the bourgeoisie was too pusillanimous in the epoch of revolution and capitalist decline to carry out its own tasks. It was afraid of aiding the proletariat. The proletarian revolution, in its turn, had to go beyond the single country where it arises because socialism is a world system or it is not socialism at all.8 Once socialism has triumphed in the world the universal class, the proletariat, must carry out its last task in abolishing itself. It must abolish its slave culture and undergo a Cultural Revolution in which it acquires the values of a socialist and so universalist culture. It is easy to trace the origins of this argument in the nature of the proletariat as the universal class. As the universal class, the proletariat takes on the duty of emancipating all other classes and social groups. Hence in an epoch when the bourgeoisie must divide society and most particularly the proletariat, only the proletariat as it becomes itself, the universal class, can emancipate all other groups. Trotsky has taken the internal dynamic inherent in the category, universal class, and taken it to its limits. He does not use the word universal class because it is not necessary for his purposes. The third aspect in which Trotsky’s dialectical method showed itself was in his analysis of the USSR and the rejection of the concept of socialism in one country. Trotsky’s political economy of the USSR, in which he described the formation of a new ruling group, which, in its turn, used Stalin as its battering ram, has been the starting point of most serious analyses of the USSR. Today few would quarrel with the rejection of socialism in one country. The Soviet Union is no more, having embarked on that road. Trotsky’s analysis of the class forces at work in the early and late 1920s is unrivalled. It was at the end of the twenties that Trotsky was exiled and lost contact with Soviet Union.
Trotsky – in decline Just as all societies go through a process of coming into being, maturing and decline so too do human beings. Trotsky, indeed, developed the whole concept of decline.9 It was Trotsky, himself, who pointed out that a society in the ascendant makes the individuals in power look clever and powerful, whereas in decline its leaders look stupid and powerless.
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So too with Trotsky. When once he ceased to be the leader of the revolution, he lost contact with the nature of revolution itself. He could no longer formulate laws of revolution. His cruel exile, the murder of his children and his isolation all added their toll. His work became more rigid. It lacked the originality and subtlety of his revolutionary formulations. While his political prognostications were often correct, as on Fascism and the inevitability of the Second World War, his overall political analysis lent itself to dogmatism. He spoke of the victory of the Fourth International when there was no basis for it.10 He still saw the USSR as a degenerate workers’ state, when all vestiges of workers’ control had vanished.11 He himself argued that the USSR was politically worse than Fascism12 and, conceding to Shachtman, that there might have to be a social revolution.13 He had himself argued that the USSR was not planned, that planning could only exist when there was a democracy.14 Yet, he spoke of the USSR as planned15 and also having a socialist base, because of its property relations, although it was not socialist.16 He spoke of the law of absolute immizeration as proven by the Great Depression.17 Sidney Hook indeed takes this last prediction with a number of the others Trotsky made in the same article and argues that they all proved false.18 The problem with these formulations is not that they are necessarily wrong but that they do not gel with his concept of dialectics. They are absolute statements but not laws or forms of motion. Furthermore, as in the case of planning he actually contradicts himself both implicitly and directly. One can understand why he produced statements that were the direct opposite of what he had previously argued. The USSR was changing rapidly and it was not clear where it might go. It was, also not fore-ordained how capitalism could change. Sidney Hook accuses Trotsky of being simplistic and a fanatic19 and indeed in that particular article, Trotsky lays himself open to such a charge by triumphantly pointing to the reality of the Great Depression. Trotsky was right at the time and had capitalism been overthrown, no one would have argued with him. Capitalism, however, was not overthrown and the Depression was followed by a rise in the standard of living for the American working class greater than that which it had experienced over the previous century and more. Although one can argue that Trotsky could not have predicted the postwar settlement, his earlier analyses of capitalism, as in 1921, displayed a sober and subtle assessment of capitalism, which contrasts with the almost triumphal words, which he used in the article in question. Just as orthodox economics is its own paradigm, which cannot easily
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be faulted internally but which can be questioned through examining its premises, so too Marxism is its own paradigm. Trotsky made correct predictions, on world war, Fascism, on Russia and the Soviet Union but he also wrongly forecasted the future of capitalism and the Soviet Union. All great thinkers make mistakes. The question is whether their mistakes are fruitful or not. Sidney Hook’s argument now looks superficial because many of Trotsky’s predictions do not look as out of place as when he wrote his diatribe. The period of Keynesian growth came to an end by 1973 with all its consequences of increasing inequality between the classes, and declining standard of living for much of the world, though not all. The word crisis is today so overused that it has lost its force. Trotsky appears at least perceptive if not wholly correct. What then was the problem with late Trotsky’s thought? The world was very different after the Russian Revolution and during the Great Depression than before this period. Before 1917, the role of the subjective was more limited than after 1917. Conscious direction played an ever-increasing role in the lives of all modern societies. That meant that objective laws were subject to conscious direction. Individuals could play a much greater role in society than ever before. Trotsky, of course, saw that and came up with the view that the whole question of revolution reduced itself to one of leadership.20 Yet, subjective social democracy and Stalinism became objectified in society itself. Stalinism became a social system of its own kind. Stalinism could continue without Stalin. Stalin played a decisive role in Stalinism, as could many of his successors, most particularly Gorbachev. It was this movement and interaction, of the subjective and objective, that was missing in Trotsky’s work in his later years. The world had become more complex than in the earlier period for the very reason that the Russian Revolution had triumphed making possible both Stalinism and social democracy. Unfortunately Trotsky was isolated and without the contact of the great revolutionaries who had surrounded him. Lenin, Preobrazhensky, Rakovsky, and others, were all dead or dying. As a result, he could not have the kind of everyday argument that would have permitted the development of his thought.
The successful destruction of Marxist thought Above all, Stalinism succeeded not just in killing him but in so isolating him that his work could not influence the proletariat and the proletarian intelligentsia. He was so demonized that even today the former Soviet Union (FSU) proletariat has no idea what he stood for. The FSU
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intelligentsia remains hostile to this day. His critique of the USSR is today commonplace and indeed somewhat conservative. None the less, he remains unhonoured, and largely unknown in his birthplace. His books have been printed in Russian and they have sold out but it remains hard to find anyone who understands his work, even if they disagree. The Russian proletariat did not need to be told that it was exploited but it did need to be told why they were exploited and how it could be overcome. Socialism seemed either monstrous or impossible. Stalinism destroyed the very concept of socialism for the FSU population. There appeared to be no hope and no alternative. That, of course, was the reason for the killing of Trotsky and his ideas. One particular aspect of this successful destruction was a derivative form of argument that said that one side was as bad as the other. Some took the view that the discussion on socialism in one country was similar to the discussion as to how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. It was sophistry or Talmudism, it was said. The discussion is irrelevant, in short. An analysis of those who argue these points will soon show that they are often former Stalinists still anxious to avoid a thorough rethink of their old positions. That does not make them necessarily wrong, of course. They are part of the problem, however, because Stalin was not just wrong, monstrous in his mass orgy of killings, but profoundly anti-Marxist. His writings and apologetics became an everyday part of much of political practice. The South African Communist Party, for instance, could justify its conservative practice by arguing a two-stage theory based on national liberation. Both the two-stage theory and national liberation were Stalinist doctrinal inventions. So, today, the South African government can justify a policy that is more conservative than earlier Conservative governments in the United Kingdom. In this context, Trotsky’s Marxism stands opposed to much of what has passed for modern or Western Marxism. Indeed much of Western Marxism, so-called, amounts to a detour, to avoid Trotsky and the rejection of socialism in one country. It could be said that Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, Korsch and various modern day theorists have superseded Trotsky. While no one ought to argue that there are no developments in Marxism since the 1920s, or that later Marxist theorists have nothing to say, their contributions are either highly specialized or more limited. Trotsky remained on the firm ground of political economy and he continued to argue for the universal nature of the proletariat, which many of these other writers abandoned. In that sense, he has continued to embody modern Marxism in opposition to Stalinist writers, who not
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only provided apologetics for particular countries but also abandoned many of the ingredients of Marxism from dialectics, through the labour theory of value, the universal nature of the proletariat and the abolition of the law of value and so the market. Modern Stalinism has gone through a metamorphosis. First it argued for socialism in one country and accepted authoritarianism, and it facilitated the rise of Hitler, then it later stood for multi-stage revolutions, alliances with the bourgeoisie as well as socialism in one country. As the USSR declined it began to shed aspects of Marxism which it formerly supported, in however bowdlerized a form, from the labour theory of value to dialectics. The final form is one in which Lenin is found to be a dictator and hence Trotsky also. The modern Stalinist stands for ‘democracy’ by which he means that he has abandoned socialism and is now a liberal. Stalinism, is above all the doctrine of socialism in one country and one kind of the modern Stalinist clings to that argument in that he argues that social democracy or liberal capitalism can still be built in one country. Another of the species argues that socialism in one country is indeed impossible and for that reason socialism is impossible. This argument is indeed adduced in the documents of the South African Communist Party.21
Trotskyist parties In essence, I have argued above that Trotsky was one of the greatest Marxist thinkers and that anyone who does not learn from him is not a Marxist. But I have also argued that Trotsky deteriorated under the influence of the pressure placed on him and the events that caused him to be sidelined. The problem was that the Trotskyist parties did not understand the peculiar circumstances in which they were born or the limitations of the thought of any one man. Trotsky had called for a Fourth International at an unpropitious time. The revolutionaries of the USSR and of the major Communist parties were liquidated. The world entered a period of profound reaction from which it is only now emerging. Whether it actually does emerge fully from such a situation is still to be determined. Trotsky’s optimism was doomed but it, unfortunately, also led the Trotskyist parties down the wrong road. Instead of preparing for a long period of reaction, they acted as immediate successors to the Communist parties. Instead of looking for more limited forms of action, they acted as mini-parties themselves. These actions might have been unimportant in a context of slow
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peaceful change but in a world of war and revolution, they turned the Trotskyist groups into caricatures of themselves. The Stalinists killed them, as in Vietnam, and beat them up or victimized them where they did not have power. In turn, the isolated Trotskyist groups turned in on themselves. They specialized on discussing their relations with Stalinism. They frequently turned Trotsky into an idol, worshipping his every word. By so doing such people lost the ability to analyse society and became less than Marxist. Although they supported all the positions of Trotsky, they were unable to use any of them to understand the evolution of society. They maintained his formal political positions but lost his dialectical method. Worse still, was the difficulty in remaining in such a closed group. Inevitably personal differences were elevated into political differences. Small political differences were magnified. Important political differences could not be discussed and became major splits. Hence the Trotskyist groups increased in number and came to encompass a range of political positions. It is in this context that Trotsky’s own decline becomes magnified. Understood in its context, it does not play a very big role. However, the Trotskyist groups took Trotsky’s last formulations as gospel and failed to see their evolution or even Trotsky’s contradictions or inconsistencies in his own later writings. They fossilized the conception of the USSR as a ‘workers’ state’. In reaction, some Trotskyist groups developed two other conceptions: that of state capitalism and bureaucratic collectivism. A major problem with these doctrines was that they were developed by theorists who had little knowledge of the USSR, often not even knowing the Russian language. The result was their theories of the USSR had no empirical basis. Furthermore, the theoretical basis of these doctrines remained weak. They were often little more than a negative description of the USSR, written in reaction to the ‘workers’ state’ theory. Again in contrast, with them they never took Trotsky’s own conception of the transitional epoch to its logical conclusion. Trotsky sees it as the period during which the old order is objectively declining but the revolutionary forces of the working class have yet to defeat the old ruling class. It is, therefore, a period of partial victories and defeats. ‘It is impossible to say how long the proletarian revolution will endure from its beginning to its termination: It is the question of an entire historical epoch.’22 An historical epoch has to be theorized as such but it was only in the 1970s that such theories developed. Mandel was the first Trotskyist who
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attempted to do so, whether one agrees with him or not. The vacuum however was filled by other theorists like the World Systems theorists and the regulation school. Their analyses were based on very different premises from those of Trotsky. On the other hand, the Trotskyist groups have been proved historically correct in arguing the non-socialist nature of the USSR and their different viewpoints have formed consciously or unconsciously the starting point of much analysis of the USSR itself. Unfortunately, their monastic character meant that they did not develop political economy. Trotsky’s own political economy was most explicitly developed in the period from 1919 to 1926, when he formulated the concept of the long wave and produced descriptions of the world capitalist economy. The fact that he did not develop these concepts in the 1930s meant that much of what he had written earlier was lost until the sixties. The revival of the left in the sixties changed the nature of the Trotskyist groups. From being tiny sects they became large grouplets or groupuscules. From playing a despized role on the margins of the left intelligentsia they became the most dynamic section of the left intelligentsia in the UK, France and the United States. It is true that in some countries they did not develop a significant role on the organized left. Maoism and anarcho-Marxism sometimes played a more important role as in Italy. But these formations could only have a limited future.
The collapse of Stalinism and its results In my view, Trotsky’s essential oversight lay in his optimistic forecast of the end of the Soviet Union during the coming world war. This was grounded in his view that Stalinism was centrist and hence could not constitute a system of its own kind, however temporary. Trotsky clearly did not expect the USSR to last as long as it did and he was hoping that the left would replace Stalinism in the USSR and in the rest of the world. He still saw the issue as subjective, whereas by 1937–38, the left had been liquidated and Stalinism had found a mode of existence albeit through the political and economic atomization of the population. The system was unviable over decades but none the less it could maintain itself for more than half a century. Trotsky’s insight that Stalinism was unviable was correct but his time perspective was wrong precisely because he could not conceive of a temporary equilibrium in social relations induced by this atomization. The underlying destruction of a substantial section of the population was almost unthinkable. The
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peculiarity of the USSR lay in its peculiar blend of the subjective and the objective. Instead of seeing this dialectical interrelationship many saw the USSR in a mechanical form. Above all, they were unable to see the importance of Stalinism itself for the World Economy. Hence the end of the Soviet Union took the Trotskyist groups from the British SWP to the United Secretariat by surprise. Those groups most associated with the ‘workers’ state’ were in some difficulty because their analysis proved wrong even before the downfall of the USSR. They have tended either to disintegrate, as the British WRP or merge with the reformed Communist parties as in France and Italy. On the other side, some of the Communist parties that continue to exist, such as the South African Communist Party, have tended to adapt to the new situation by taking a less dogmatic Stalinist line. Thus the South African Communist Party speaks of learning from Bukharin Trotsky, Mao, and other formerly proscribed leftist figures.23 The line between Trotskyist and Stalinist is now blurring. In Scotland, the Militant Group has formed the Scottish Socialist Alliance with the Scottish Communist Party and others. In Italy, the Reconstructed Communist Party includes Trotskyists both among its members and its Central Committee. Although there is no common ground between those who support socialism and one country and those who do not, between those who support the purges and those who do not, the end of Stalinism has changed one time Stalinists’ perception of the USSR and of their antiStalinist opponents At the same time, differences between the groupuscules were largely based on their views of the USSR. Today such differences appear less important. It is true that those characterizations of the USSR also reflected differences in the interpretations of capitalism but these also appear less important now that one of the main enemies Stalinism has disappeared. The environment appears at once more hostile and friendlier. It seems more hostile because Marxism is no longer recognized as meaningful. It is more friendly because Marxists are no longer perceived as constituting a threat to the state. Both these conditions are conducive to the formation of less sectarian organizations. There is, therefore, a further result of the end of Stalinism. The isolation of the Trotskyist groups has come to an end. To a considerable extent, Trotskyism is the left in the United Kingdom and some other countries, in its many incarnations. Trotsky’s ideas have begun to penetrate in the same way as those of Marx, by osmosis through the intellectual life of the country. The impossibility of socialism in one country
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appears commonplace under conditions of globalization.24 That a new bureaucratic elite took power in the USSR is generally accepted. The revolutionary content of the permanent revolution is another matter, precisely because of its uncompromising nature. None the less, for those who see the proletariat as the universal class, the argument is unchallengeable. The concept of National Liberation, which stands in direct conflict with the concept of permanent revolution, has lost its basis in reality. It is clear that no ex-colonial country has become independent of imperialism, however defined. Today, after the stock exchanges and currencies of the underdeveloped or former colonial countries suffered a free fall in 1998, it is quite clear that the metropolitan countries continue to govern and that the standard of living of the workers and peasants of many countries remains not just low but even below that of colonialism in some cases. National liberation simply removed formal colonialism to replace it with a local elite, which sometimes, but not always, constitutes a bourgeoisie, junior to that of the metropolitan countries. For the masses the result has often been more of a catastrophe than a liberation, as in Angola, the Congo, Ethiopia, Mozambique, etc. Trotsky’s view that only the working class could solve bourgeois democratic issues, under conditions of capitalist decline could not be more true. Now, in the year 2000, a date of no importance for Marxism, it is clear that the world is moving towards a global downturn. I would argue that we are now moving into a depression.25 This paper is not the place to discuss its political economy, save for one aspect, which is of prime importance for understanding both the downturn and the future of Trotskyism. That aspect is the role of the end of Stalinism in facilitating that depression. In my view, it is absolutely crucial. There were three ways in which Stalinism maintained capitalism itself. Trotsky, of course, saw Stalinism as a defender of capitalism but he did not integrate its defence into a theory of capitalism itself and that is what has been necessary. Mandel, who has been probably the best known theorist of Marxist and Trotskyist political economy in the last 40 years, ignored its role in the maintenance of capitalism. For that reason, he failed to understand capitalism as well as the USSR, in my view: 1. The working class in the developed countries could be disciplined by the doctrine of anti-communism to conform to a war situation. The core descriptions of the Soviet Union in this doctrine were correct and corresponded to the experience of sections of the
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American working class who either derived from those areas or who had relations there. As a result, the doctrine worked in reducing the power of trade unions, left parties and in getting workers to see their responsibilities under conditions of a cold war fought apparently for freedom. 2. The Communist parties played the role of controllers of the working class in the developed countries by preventing movements from becoming revolutionary. Hence full employment became less dangerous as long as workers contained their demands. Inflation could be low. Social democracy played a crucial role here but it is not difficult to show that social democracy after the war became dependent on Stalinism. 3. The cold war itself absorbed the surplus value that would otherwise have depressed the rate of profit. It did this through the arms industry which created high levels of demand so overcoming the tendency to underconsumption but also through paying firms higher prices to raise the rate of profit and also by absorbing the surplus capital in the producer goods section. Today all three aspects have gone. Because the workers cannot be controlled the reserve army of labour must be restored. At the same time, levels of arms expenditure have gone down by 30 per cent on 1986 in the United States. Under these conditions, the long postwar boom must end in stagnation or economic collapse. This has already happened on the periphery but that is only because the centre can shuffle off the problem to the extremities of the system to begin with. It is not the purpose of this paper to pursue the political economy further but only to consider its results on Trotsky and Trotskyism. Its consequences are profound. It has and will further demonstrate the crucial importance of Stalinism in maintaining the world system and consequently the critical role of its end in precipitating a crisis in capitalism. Trotsky and other Marxists are vindicated in arguing that there is no third way between socialism and barbarism. It could not be more true of the former USSR, where there is no capitalist solution. The transition to capitalism has failed while the path back to Stalinism is barred. The former USSR continues to disintegrate and I would argue will continue to disintegrate until socialism appears on the agenda. There is no other solution. In 1973 and later I argued that the USSR was unviable, would come
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to an end, would try to introduce the market but would fail in so doing.26 This was not an exercise in prediction but something that was both empirically obvious and theoretically justifiable for anyone who had a critical Marxist background. Above all that meant a critical understanding of Trotsky’s works.
Who won the argument? If the Trotskyist groups had not degenerated along with the society as it were, there would be no question that they had won. They continued to stand for Marxism and its core, the universal nature of the working class, when many of the Communist parties abandoned Marxism either wholly or in its crucial aspects. They provided a critique of Stalinism, much of which is today commonplace. The term Stalinism, which was once the hallmark of a Trotskyist, is now a standard word applicable to the former USSR and its ideological descendants. The ending of Stalinism has the potential to cause enormous change on the political scene. The old Stalinist type Communist parties have converted into social democrats or simply democrats, continued as tiny despised sects or disappeared entirely. At the same time, social democracy has so shifted to the right that it is indistinguishable from the centre-right. The space on the left is now open. As a result, the dogmatically enclosed groups are beginning to change. The embattled Marxist intellectuals are no longer ostracized either in the left or in the society. The termination of Stalinism has performed the duty of clearing away the debris before the new can come into being. The future of the proletariat lies in its abolition and the future of Trotskyism also lies in its supersession – through its absorption into the main currents of Marxism. Trotskyism carried the torch of Marxism through some of the most difficult years of human history and that essential core can now re-emerge as part of a broader movement, in the process of formation. There are those who argue that we are living through a period of reaction and that the above is wild optimism. I would argue, on the contrary, that we are living through one of the most vital periods of the last century. By a coincidence it happens to be occurring at the end of the old century and the beginning of the new. Much of this century has been dominated by Stalinism and it was Stalinism itself which provided the very basis for the barbarism for which this century will be marked forever. Hobsbawm talks of barbarism but omits Stalinism as barbarism, which in certain respects outdistanced that of Hitler.27 We no longer
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have this monstrous incubus on the world and the revolutionary movement. Its removal is enough to free the socialist movement and make possible what would otherwise be impossible. The approaching crisis, depression or correction, whatever it may be termed must inevitably force people towards a critique of capitalism. Already in Russia, those who formerly argued for capitalism are now against it, in however inchoate a form. They do not see an alternative precisely because that alternative, socialism, has been so denigrated by the old regime that they can only envisage it as the old oppressive USSR or as a utopia. Socialism is neither, of course. On the other hand, Marxists such as Trotsky have always argued that capitalism must develop to the point where its own internal economic laws demand that capital be superseded. Under conditions where capitalism is once again being discredited first in the emerging countries, so called, and later in the developed world, the question is whether Marxists will be ready to provide the alternative. I would argue that Trotsky and the Trotskyists were essential for that alternative but there is still a long way to go both in the development of Marxist theory and the socialist movement itself.
Notes 1. Hillel Ticktin, ‘Obituary to Ernest Mandel’, Critique 30–31, 1998, p. 261. 2. L. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (London, Victor Gollancz, 1965). 3. I have tried to draw out a number of aspects of Trotsky’s thought in my essays in Hillel Ticktin and Michael Cox, The Ideas of Leon Trotsky (London, Porcupine Press, 1995). This essay stands on its own but it does use some of my arguments in that work. 4. I use the phrase ‘Stalinist period’ to apply to the years from 1923 down to 1990 or so when Marxism was re-interpreted by supporters and fellow travellers of the Soviet Union into a form of apologetics. As Stalinism was dominant among those terming themselves left-wing, revolutionary or Marxist, Stalinism was incorrectly taken to be Marxism. 5. See, for instance, Philip Pomper, Trotsky’s Notebooks, 1933–1935, Writings on Lenin, Dialectics and Evolutionism (New York, Columbia University Press, 1986); and Leon Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition (Philosophical Tendencies of Bureaucratism, Appendix B) (New York, Pathfinder Press, 1981) pp. 389–409. 6. Ibid. p. 397. 7. Ibid. 8. ‘The proletariat, however, having seized power . . . could not stop at the achievement of these democratic tasks. The bourgeois revolution was directly bound up with the first stages of a socialist revolution. That fact was not accidental. The history of recent decades very clearly shows that, in the con-
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9.
10. 11.
12. 13.
14.
15.
16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
23. 24.
ditions of capitalist decline, backward countries are unable to attain that level which the old centres of capitalism have attained.’ Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (London, Faber and Faber, 1937) p. 13. L. Trotsky, ‘Presenting Karl Marx’, in Leon Trotsky Presents the Living Thoughts of Karl Marx (Greenwich, CT, Fawcett, 1963) p. 16; cf. ‘Just as the operation of the laws of physiology yields different results in a growing organism from those in a dying one, so the economic laws of Marxist economy assert themselves differently in a developing and a disintegrating capitalism’. Ibid. p. 29. The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (New York, Pioneer Publishers, 1964) p. 60. Trotsky was its chief author. The conclusion to one of the last letters in the book, Leon Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism (London, New Park, 1966) p. 222, continues the support of the workers’ state in very strong form. L. Trotsky, The Transitional Programmme, Documents of the Fourth International (New York, Pathfinder Press, 1973) p. 181. Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism (note 11), p. 4: ‘Needless to say, the distribution of productive forces among the various branches of the economy and generally the entire content of the plan will be drastically changed when this plan is determined by the interests not of the bureaucracy but of the producers themselves’. . . . ‘Certain of our critics (Ciliga, Bruno and others) want, come what may, to call the future revolution social. Let us grant this definition. What does it alter in essence?’. Alarm Signal! Writings of Leon Trotsky (New York, Pathfinder Press, 1932–1933) p. 96. Trotsky speaks of the details of democratic control over planning in terms of the masses critical review of their collective experience, without which planning, he says, is impossible. It, follows, therefore that there was no planning. It is interesting to note that Trotsky later in 1933, says that the Soviet economy is not planned but is a bureaucratic economy: Writings Of Leon Trotsky (New York, Pathfinder Press, 1932–1933) p. 224. In contrast he talks of a planned economy in The Revolution Betrayed (note 8). Trotsky frequently refers to the Soviet Union having a planned economy but possibly the most definitive case is in his definition of the nature of the Soviet Union in his classic work The Revolution Betrayed (note 8), p. 241. Ibid. p. 58 and passim. Trotsky, Living Thoughts of Karl Marx (note 9), pp. 25–6. Ibid. pp. 9–10. Ibid. pp. 8–9. ‘The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.’ Trotsky, Death Agony (note 10), pp. 5, 6. ‘Our Marxism’, The African Communist 149, 2nd Quarter 1998, p. 75. L. Trotsky, ‘Report on the Fifth Anniversary of the October Revolution and the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International. October 20, 1922’, in Leon Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Comintern, Vol. 2 (London, New Park Publications, 1953) p. 187. ‘Our Marxism’, The African Communist 149, 2nd Quarter, 1998, p. 75. Thus the South African Communist Party organ declared ‘We believe the era of “socialism in one bloc” is over’. Ibid. p. 67. This did not, however, prevent the same article critically supporting the old Soviet Union.
198 Hillel Ticktin 25. For a more profound discussion on this issue see my article in Critique 30–31 ‘Where are we going today: The Nature of Contemporary Crisis’, pp. 21–48. It is hardly possible to read a financial newspaper or journal that does discuss or hint at an approaching downturn. See for instance: The Economist Editorial, ‘The World’s Forgotten Danger’, The Economist, 14 Nov 1998, p. 15, where it points out that it had spoken previously of the fact that ‘America’s economy was vulnerable to a sharp slowdown even to a recession’ and therefore it was not the first time that it warned of an end to the bubble economy’. As this article was revised, the Economist repeated its warning by discussing the vulnerability of the banks in the United States in the event of such a slowdown. ‘America’s Creaky Banks’, The Economist, 10 July 1999, pp. 93–4. 26. H. H. Ticktin, ‘Towards a Political Economy of the USSR’, Critique 1, May 1973, pp. 20–41. 27. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London, Abacus, 1996) passim.
10 Democratic Marxism: the Legacy of Hal Draper Alan Johnson
However well-intentioned Marxists are nowadays about the need to value democracy the latter simply cannot play a significant theoretical role in the class analysis of politics (Gregor McLennan). The iron dictatorship exercised by the Stalinist police administrative apparatus over the Soviet proletariat was not incompatible with the preservation of the proletarian nature of the state itself – any more than . . . the fascist dictatorships exercised over the bourgeois class were with the preservation of the nature of the capitalist state (Perry Anderson). Political power is not a pre-condition for bourgeois rule, why should it be a precondition for working class rule? (Oliver Macdonald). Stalinism is a social system based on the state ownership of the decisive means of production and the uncontrolled domination of the state machine by the bureaucracy, not by the working people. The state owns industry and an uncontrolled bureaucracy ‘owns’ the state. Socialism, on the other hand, is the collective ownership of the decisive means of production under the democratic control of the working people themselves. The vast difference is the existence of democracy for the mass of people. This is so because of the very nature of the working class as a class. Unlike the bourgeoisie, which is by nature a property owning class, it does not develop its economic and social power 199
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within the womb of the old society. The bourgeoisie could do this under feudalism because its social power is expressed in the first place through its ownership of the private property on which the wealth of society rests. The working class, which owns no property, can ‘own’ and control the means of production only through a political intermediary, the state. And it can ‘own’ and control the state only through democratic participation. Without democracy statification points not to socialism but to what we know as Stalinism. Democracy, therefore, is not merely of sentimental or moral value for the Marxists, nor is it merely a preference. It designates the only way in which the rule of the working class can exist in political actuality (Hal Draper).1 How many today would disagree with Vasily Grossman’s suggestion, in his book Forever Flowing, part novel, part meditation on the Soviet Gulag, that behind all those ‘crazed eyes; smashed kidneys; [the] skull[s] pierced by a bullet; rotting infected, gangrenous toes; and scurvy racked corpses in log-cabin, dugout morgues’, stands the figure of Karl Marx?2 The idea of a genetic link between Marx and Stalin has established itself as ‘normal science’ and to paraphrase the poet Yevtushenko, the guard has been doubled, trebled over Marx’s tomb. Marxism must confront the horrors of its twentieth century past if it is to have a twenty-first century future. Each and every foothold it offered the Gulag must be rooted out. This chapter examines one contribution to the task, Hal Draper’s excavation of an alternative, radically democratic Marx and the development of a democratic Marxism by the group he helped to lead, the Workers’ Party-Independent Socialist League (WP-ISL) from 1940 to 1958. Draper’s achievement was threefold. First, a unique re-interpretation of the history of socialism as a war between ‘two souls’: ‘socialism from above’, the authoritarian imposition of a collectivist social order, and ‘socialism from below’, the self-emancipatory struggle of the exploited and oppressed. Second, in his four-volume Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, one of the great pieces of Marxist scholarship of the twentieth century, Draper cast Marx as the founder of socialism from below, a man who by defining ‘socialism’ as an open-ended process of selfemancipation established socialism, democracy and liberty as a chain of necessary relations.3 Draper helps us to separate this democratic Marxism from its totalitarian ‘doppleganger’. Third is the collective achievement of the WP-ISL, described recently by Stanley Aronowitz as ‘the most intellectually vital of all the radical formations in the 1940s and 1950s’ in the United States.4 Theorizing socialism, liberty and democracy
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as indivisible, each the necessary foundation of any open process of selfemancipation, the WP-ISL was able to subject both Stalinism and postwar capitalism to a comprehensive democratic Marxist critique. This body of writing from the 1940s and 1950s, and Draper’s later Marx scholarship, is attracting an ever-wider readership among a younger generation of rebels who find themselves amid the dust and rubble of the so-called ‘workers’ states’ and know that restoring hope to socialism, and purpose to Marxism, will involve tending the democratic soul of both.
The ‘two souls of socialism’ Draper’s first contribution was quite startling. He traced the disaster of twentieth-century Marxism to ‘the ambiguous history of the socialist idea’ itself. In a seminal essay first published in 1960, Draper retold that history as nothing less than a war between ‘two souls’: socialism from above and socialism from below. At stake, the meaning of socialism.5 ‘Socialism from above’ he defined as ‘. . . the tendency to conceive of socialism . . . as a societal rearrangement to be handed down to the grateful masses . . . by a ruling elite which is not in fact subjected to the masses control . . . or indeed, to be imposed upon the people from above, whether they are grateful or not’. ‘Socialism from below’, by contrast . . . puts all emphasis on the subversive transformation of the source of controlling power in society, the displacement of the power from up above to down below; and the extension of this controlfrom-below not only to political but also to economic life. Its corollary is that socialism can be realized only through the selfemancipation of activized masses in motion; reaching out for their autonomy (‘freedom’) with their own hands, mobilized from below in a struggle to take charge of their own destiny; as actors (not merely subjects) on the stage of history.6 The subversive idea at the essay’s heart was that socialism from above had enjoyed near uncontested dominance within the socialist tradition until Marx founded a democratic alternative by fusing political democracy and the social question on the ground on self-emancipation. Draper’s account of the pre-history of his essay captures his own shock at this discovery: During most of the 1950s I edited an Independent Socialist weekly, Labor Action, which regularly attacked both capitalism and Stalinism.
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Someone . . . drafted a statement titled ‘Stalinism is not Socialism!’ . . . I’m sure we all believed that assertion. In the middle of 1958 . . . I settled down to a period of reading and research in the history of socialism that went on for almost a year and a half. Its focus was on tracing the antidemocratic (in modern slang, ‘authoritarian’) currents in the early and later formation of the socialist movement. I knew well enough that these currents existed. What I discovered however penetrated beneath the surface of popular socialistic historiography . . . the difficulty was not in finding the antidemocratic elements, it was in identifying any representatives – even a very few – of consistent advocacy of a socialism-from-below, the only ‘democratic socialism’ worth recognizing. ‘Stalinism’ – and its forerunners – or, in general, authoritarian forms of socialist thinking and organization – had far more claim to the socialist tradition than I did. It was not a wild aberration, as the joint statement had seemed to say.7 In fact whether Draper looked at the educational dictatorships proposed by Babeuf, Buonarroti or Blanqui, the elitism and authoritarianism of Saint-Simon, Lassalle, Bellamy or Proudhon (‘all this democracy disgusts me’), the philanthropy of Owen, Fourier or Cabet, the bureaucratic plannism of the Webbs, the statism of Bernstein, or the tyranny of Stalinism, it turned out that the dominant soul of socialism – close to the only soul in fact – was socialism from above. Draper dedicated much of the rest of his life to excavating the other, marginalized, democratic soul of socialism, establishing Marx as its founding figure, delineating its specificity as a theory of self-emancipation, and its ramifications for the relation of socialism to democracy and liberty, organization and strategy,8 internationalism,9 and for the relation of working class and social movement.10 Draper argued the great divide in socialism was not peculiar to socialism. ‘Yearning for emancipation-from-above’ had been the ‘all pervading principle through centuries of class society’. The socialist idea had to arrive ‘trailing after it all [these] customary mental and spiritual habits and patterns’.11 Only with the growth of the modern working class could the idea of self-emancipation and the discourse of socialism from below come blinking into the light. Draper identified the ‘essential originality’ of Marx in his theorization of self-emancipation, the ‘first principle of his life work’, as the basis for a new socialism. The three volumes of Capital are ‘nothing but the demonstration of the economic basis’ of self-emancipation.12 Defining socialism in this way positioned socialism, democracy and liberty as indivisible, or, to borrow but also extend a phrase of Norberto Bobbio’s, as
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a chain of necessary relations.13 Draper read the subsequent history of Marxism, and socialism more generally, as a ‘continual but largely unsuccessful effort to free itself from the . . . tradition of emancipationfrom-above’.14 Stalinism, the recrudescence of socialism from above in the form of bureaucratic absolutism in a backward country, was the legitimate heir to a long tradition of anti-democratic socialist thought.
Marx and the foundation of democratic marxism Marx was the first socialist thinker and leader who came to socialism through the struggle for liberal democracy.15 From 1970 to his death in 1990 Draper devoted himself almost exclusively to Marx scholarship. The main result was the four-volume Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, two thousand pages of meticulous textual exegesis and analysis of the political theory and practice of socialism from below.16 The central argument: Marx did not abandon liberty and democracy to become a Communist but became a Communist in order to make real the promise of liberty and democracy. Draper mapped an essential continuity in this approach from ‘his democratic views of 1842 [to] the revolutionary communism of his mature years’.17 Draper traced Marx’s lightning quick journey in the early 1840s from a ‘radical democratic liberal’ to a ‘revolutionary democratic communist.’ He begins as a ‘democratic extremist’ unambiguously for freedom of expression and organization, the rule of law and democratic institutions, viscerally opposed to the power of the state and its core, the bureaucracy. What forced a development of this ‘democratic extremism’ was his insistence on treating freedom and democracy not as abstractions, free-floating discourses, but in their external social relations here down on earth. The consequence, argues Draper, was not the dismissal of freedom as fraudulent but the indictment of both the social relations of capitalism and unrestrained state power as inimical to freedom. Both would have to go. This unique journey to socialism ended with the foundation of a new conception of socialism. Draper summarized this development in Marx’s political thought: Marx was the first socialist figure to come to an acceptance of the socialist idea through the battle for the consistent expression of democratic control from below. He was the first figure in the socialist movement who, in a personal sense, came through the bourgeoisdemocratic movement: through it to its farthest bounds, and then
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out by its farthest end. In this sense, he was the first to fuse the struggle for consistent political democracy with the struggle for a socialist transformation. But it might be asked, wasn’t it the case that, in his course from bourgeois democracy to communism, Marx relinquished his early naive notions about political democracy? Not in Marx’s view.18
Socialism as self-emancipation Marx’s theory moved in the direction of defining consistent democracy in socialist terms and consistent socialism in democratic terms. The task of theory . . . is not to adjudicate a clash between the two considerations . . . but rather to grasp the social dynamics of the situation under which the apparent contradiction between the two is resolved.19 The ‘social dynamics of the situation’ were the rise of capitalism and the modern working class which created the material ground on which the relationship of the social question to political freedom might be ‘resolved’ through a political process of self-emancipation. Draper states, This is the democratic heart of Marxism: for the first time in history it has become possible for the ‘lowest’ class to rule, that class on whose labour all the rest of society depends. For the first time, therefore, a new social order is possible in the interests of the most numerous class, whose rule by that token means the abolition of all class rule. It cannot substitute itself for the private rulers of property by itself gaining control of property: it can rule only through the collectivity, only democratically.20 The core or essential structure of democratic Marxism is this theoretical integration of socialism and democracy, not some economic necessitarianism. But the character of this new socialism from below, the way it overturns every verity dear to socialism from above, from the content of socialism to the strategy to achieve socialism, from the nature of a socialist polity to the role of socialist theory, has been little understood in Marx’s time or subsequently. As self-emancipation the content of socialism can no longer be The Idea. There can be no blueprint. The socialist can no longer imagine the
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people to be ‘a clean sheet of paper with no blotches’ on which he or she writes ‘beautiful words’ (these fascistic words are, as it happens, Mao’s). Understood and practiced as self-emancipation socialism is the pursuit of the Interest, blotches and all, for as Marx and Engels knew, ‘The “idea” always disgraced itself insofar as it was different from the “interest” ’. Draper noted that Marx rejected Bauer precisely because his ‘conception of social reorganization [was] based on the antithesis between spirit and mass’. Marx refused to think that ‘the Spirit, or the Criticism, represents the organizing labor, the mass the raw material, and history the product’.21 In other words as self-emancipation socialism cannot, by definition, be an organicism in which the individual’s moral status or rights are abolished in the name of ‘society’ or ‘progress’. Tocqueville’s charge, that socialism seeks a society of beavers not individuals, is echoed in Marx’s own critique of socialism from above. Draper defined socialism from below as not only revolutionary and democratic but also humanistic, the moral status of the individual at its heart: . . . the rights and privileges of the individual must not be subordinated to the glorification of state or communal collectivity, or to the maximization of its power, but, exactly to the contrary, . . . the authority and rights of the organized collectivity or state are justified only insofar as they contribute to the full development of every individual’s potentialities as a human being. The beehive or anthill conception of collectivism is not socialism but the image of a new tyranny.22 No less than the content, the strategy for achieving socialism is turned upside down once understood as self-emancipation. The Enlightened Dictatorship, beloved of socialists from Blanqui to Deng, is incompatible with that learning-through-doing, what Norman Geras has called ‘interiority,23 which lies at the heart of self-emancipation as a social process. Strategy, therefore is an open-ended process of practical critique. ‘We do not dogmatically anticipate the world but rather want to find the new world only through criticism of the old’, said Marx.24 Draper shows how this led Marx and Engels directly to an engagement with bourgeois democracy, to refuse the anarchist rejection of politics, and to argue instead for political struggle to realize the promise of bourgeois democracy through a fight for the extension of equality from the civil to the social and economic spheres. In 1848–49 Marx looked to a dynamic process of popular political struggle in which the demand for liberalization would stimulate a drive for constitutionalism, a democratic
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political life and a government of laws, until this struggle in turn spilled over uninterruptedly to a revolutionary drive for democratization of social and economic life as such, popular control from below.25 Marx saw the ‘maturation’ of the agency of socialism as synonymous with this process of political struggle. Finally, the principle of self-emancipation transforms the nature and role of theory itself. Draper read Marx’s Third Thesis on Feuerbach as the ‘ “philosophic” formulation of the principle of self-emancipation’ and therefore ‘the first time in socialist thought that theory turns around to take a hard look at the theoretician’. Draper concluded that for Marx, ‘political theory develops as a guide to revolutionary practice in the course of which the revolutionary changes society, and the struggle changes the revolutionary and his political theory’.26 In other words, far from theory providing a blueprint to which the masses will be made to fit, self-emancipation suggests a reflexive and open Marxism, porous to experience. This reading of Marx as a democratic socialist from below often puzzles because it contradicts the common-sense idea that Marx’s concept of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat meant ‘a developed political pluralism cannot be countenanced’.27 It was one of Draper’s major contributions to democratic Marxism to challenge this ‘common-sense’ about Marx, Marxism and the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’.
Democratic Marxism and ‘the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ In the third volume of Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution: The ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ (1986), Draper traced the development of the term in the thought of Marx and Engels and in The ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ from Marx to Lenin (1987) carried the story through from the death of Engels in 1895 to the degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the 1920s.28 Draper concludes there took place a ‘fateful substitution’ within the classical Marxist tradition of a dictatorial and non-democratic conception of ‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ for Marx’s democratic original.29 Draper summed up the meaning of the term for Marx: . . . Marx inaugurated the phrase to emphasize that the political power gained in a socialist revolution must be exercised by the workers as a class, democratically organized, as against the Blanquist conception of a revolutionary dictatorship by a band of conspirators over the proletariat. It was only after Marx’s time that the word
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dictatorship developed the almost invariably anti-democratic content which characterizes it today.30 The widely accepted idea that the concept ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ establishes Marx as a Blanquist is, literally, history turned upside down. Reconstructing in detail the context of each and every use of the term in Marx’s oeuvre Draper establishes that the term was used by Marx to re-educated Blanquists away from Blanquism, to confront the Blanquist mind with his, Marx’s, own alternative conception of class rule, democratic control from below, the complete democratization of society. For Marx the term did not refer to special dictatorial governmental forms at all but referred only to the class content of the state, the ‘rule of the proletariat’, which meant the working class leadership of an immense majority block. The governmental form of this rule was, simply, the democratic republic: popular control over the sovereign body of the state, universal suffrage, representative democracy, a democratic constitution, and truly mass involvement in political decision-making. Engels, in his 1895 critique of the Erfurt Programme, linked (social) form and (political) content thus: ‘. . . the working class can come to power only under the form of the democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the great French revolution has already shown’.31 But Marx and Engels’s democratic conception was substituted, fatefully, by the idea that ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ meant ‘specific governmental forms and policies – “dictatorial ones” . . . some special form of workers’ state, a specially “dictatorial one” ’.32 Draper traces the importance of the historic dominance of socialism from above in the fortunes of Marx’s concept: ‘[t]he people who “misunderstood” wanted to misunderstand: they already had a conception about “dictatorship” which they had absorbed before they ever knew Marx, and they merely used – or ignored, or attacked – Marx’s term in accordance with their own leanings’.33 Plekhanov was the originator of this fateful substitution, writing an anti-democratic, Blanquist conception of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ into the programme of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903.34 Motivating his proposal Plekhanov cast democracy as an expendable luxury, arguing ‘Salus revolutionis suprema lex’. Draper points out this involves a crude ‘means-end fallacy’ which fails to grasp everything that is specific to socialism as self-emancipation, most notably the social nature of the working class and the political conditions of its maturation and rule. Lenin would later argue that, ‘The scientific term
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“dictatorship” means nothing more nor less than authority untrammelled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever, and based directly on force. The term “dictatorship” has no other meaning than this . . .’.35 Draper observes this definition was ‘. . . a theoretical disaster, first class [with] nothing in common . . . with any conception of the workers’ state’ held by Marx.36 The isolation of the Russian Revolution and the backwardness of the country itself determined that Plekhanov’s substitute not only won out as necessity but was theorized by Lenin and others as virtue. Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin, in the manner of their counterposition of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’ democracy, reduced democracy per se to ‘bourgeois democracy’ and flatly counterpoised dictatorship to democracy. This ‘theoretical disaster’ had the consequence of gutting socialism of its organic enrootment in the mass of the people. When Stalin took another lead, the lead in organizing the socio-economic counter-revolution in class power, the ‘juridical’ basis in theory (to use Trotsky’s later expression) had already been laid. That fact is not gainsaid by another, namely, that when Bukharin and Trotsky looked upon their handiwork, they started in horror and scrambled away in another direction.37 All this should surely challenge the glib and superficial idea, actually an intellectual police action, that any attempt to return to Marx is an eschatological, quasi-religious, enterprise. Given the tortuous intertwining of socialism from above and socialism from below in the Marxist movement in the twentieth century then what Draper called a materialist conception of socialist history might well be a necessary, though obviously not a sufficient, condition for a further advance of Marxist political theory. And nowhere is this more true than in relation to Stalinism.
The ‘Russian question’ and democratic Marxism Half a century ago, in a series of debates with Trotsky about Russia which are virtually unknown within academic Marxism, some of the most talented Marxists of their generation readapted the democratic Marxist principle of self-emancipation for the era of Stalinism, establishing ‘in the most precise and scientific sense’ as Herman Benson put it, that an active and plural democracy was the sine qua non of both a socialist politics of transformation and a socialist polity.38 The fundamental concept at stake was democracy. Could a workers’ state exist without workers’
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political power? Was the nationalization of property a sufficient condition for the establishment of a workers’ state? The differing answers given would divide anti-Stalinist Marxism for the next half century. Trotsky developed two positions on these questions and gave birth to two Trotskyisms.39 His initial position held that the meaning and significance of a ‘nationalized economy’ was derived from the prior fact that the working class held political power or at least, that the ‘locum’ of workers’ power was, for now, a genuine workers’ party. In short, ‘The character of the economy as a whole thus depends upon the character of the state power’.40 While there was hope that the bureaucracy could be brought under control again – the reform perspective – it was still reasonable to call the USSR, in this strictly limited sense, a ‘workers’ state’. Trotsky saw the Stalinist bureaucracy as a temporary layer, a Bonapartist phenomena, balancing between the fundamental class forces which would settle the fate of the revolution. He admitted only two possibilities for Russia: backwards to the restoration of private property or forwards to proletarian political power and socialism. But, as Joseph Carter pointed out: Contrary to Trotsky’s predictions the destruction of the Bolshevik Party did not mean the end of state property and planning; Russia did not travel the road of Thermidorean, capitalist restoration. On the contrary, the Stalinist counter-revolution took a new hitherto unknown path, the road of bureaucratic absolutism. Faced with a strengthening of state property and the destruction of the political power of the working class, Trotsky faced a dilemma: either to maintain his old criteria and affirm that Russia is no longer a ‘workers’ state’ or to revise completely the Marxist conception of the workers’ state. He chose the latter course and thereby abandoned the Marxist view . . . He now affirmed that it was the state-owned character of property which determined the socialist character of property which determined the socialist character of the economy and the proletarian nature of the state.41 In other words, Trotsky reversed the relationship of politics and economics in his theory. Now, because property was nationalized, and because nationalized property was inherently proletarian, the state remained a workers’ state, progressive and so to be unconditionally defended in war. The working class, fantastically, remained the ruling class, its rule now expressed through, congealed in, the nationalized property. The char-
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acter of the economy now determined the class character of the state power. Matgamna has traced the consequences of this theoretical disaster of the first magnitude. What had begun as the idea that the Bolshevik Old Guard could protect temporarily the gains of the revolution developed into the view that ‘the bureaucracy represented the working class in power as long as they still defended the nationalized economy’. If there was ever a case of the Idea disgracing itself in so far as it became separated from the Interest this was it. Matgamna suggests Trotsky gave birth to an idea which: ‘. . . in its fully extended form . . . implied that the workers could rule as abstract historical subjects, in “high theory”, even where as living people, in practice, they were beasts of burden exploited by a privileged autocracy’.42 It was Joseph Carter who first and most fully grasped that Trotsky’s theory involved ‘an important methodological error . . . [a failure] to give adequate recognition to the decisive, qualitative difference between proletarian and bourgeois rule’.43 In 1940 Max Shachtman drew out the political importance of this: The rule of the proletariat cannot express itself in private ownership of capital, but only in its ‘ownership’ of the state in whose hands is concentrated all the decisive economic power. Hence its social power lies in its political power. In bourgeois society the two can be and are divorced; in the proletarian state, they are inseparable . . . from this . . . it follows in reality what does not follow in Trotsky’s analysis. The proletariat’s relations to property, to the new, collectivist property, are indivisibly bound up with its relations to the state, that is, to political power.44 Once this ‘decisive, qualitative difference between proletarian and bourgeois rule’ is understood then the concept of ‘Proletarian Bonapartism’ appears as an absurdity. First, the relation of the juridical and the socio-economic in the determination of the class content of the state power is different in the proletarian as compared with the bourgeois revolution. Trotsky thought of ‘property forms’ and property relations (social relations) as one and the same thing. But property forms, that is, nationalized property, were a secondary factor. Primary was property relations, that is, the relations of the various groups in Russia to this property. The mere fact of nationalized property forms does not establish what the property relations are. What establishes that is the relationship of people to the state to which all property belongs. To define property relations in terms of property forms is to reverse the
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order of categorial priority, to replace social relations with a juridical illusion and to substitute an economism for a rounded Marxist judgement. The consequences for one’s ability as a Marxist to theoretically ground democracy are disastrous. Second, the consequence of the development of Bonapartism is different in the proletarian as compared to the bourgeois revolution. As Max Shachtman argued, ‘Where a similar division of labour under capitalism does not transform the economic or political agents of the ruling class into a new class . . . it does tend to create a new class in a state reposing on collectivized property, that is in a state which is itself the repository of all social property’.45 Joseph Carter refuted the absurdity of ‘proletarian bonapartism’ half a century ago: Trotsky defended his new position, that the Stalinist state is a workers’ state though the working class has no political power by citing the bourgeois Bonapartist regime. The analogy would be valid only if the political expropriation of the working class had been accompanied by the strengthening of its economic and social power, its domination over society. Such was the case under all Bonapartist regimes: the political expropriation of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by . . . the strengthening of its economic and social power . . . But what does the evidence show as regards Russia? Simply this: that the working class has been deprived of all economic and social as well as political power. The strengthening of state property and planning, which allegedly signifies the social rule of the proletariat, resulted in the increased economic, social and political oppression of the working class. Here is a process which is the exact opposite of what occurs under Bonapartism!46 Third, the role of deliberative self-controlling political action is profoundly different in the proletarian revolution as compared to the bourgeois revolution. Max Shachtman pointed out that, ‘The bourgeois revolution need not necessarily be carried out by the bourgeoisie itself, that is, by the bourgeoisie as a class. The bourgeois revolution need not necessarily bring the bourgeoisie to political power . . . For the bourgeoisie it suffices that its economic system predominates’.47 In sharp contrast, the proletarian revolution must begin with the proletariat raising itself to the position of ruling class. The first step, said Marx, is to ‘win the battle of democracy’. This is so, Shachtman pointed out, because ‘consciousness and plan
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imply a self-active, aware, participating, deciding proletariat, which implies in turn a dying out of coercion and bureaucratism’.48 The encroachment of a new social logic is impossible without untrammelled democracy, civil liberties, a culture of pluralism, with maximum space for initiative from below, and for enforcing the accountability of the government representatives.
Democratic Marxism and the autonomized state In his last writings, such as ‘Letter to the Workers of the USSR’ and ‘The Comintern and the GPU’, and in his unfinished book on Stalin, where he explicitly acknowledged that the bureaucracy was struggling independently for the ‘surplus product and the power’, Trotsky stood on the very edge of declaring the bureaucracy a new exploitative ruling class.49 But he never revised his theory. To the extent that Trotsky’s tragic hesitation was due to a suspicion that to cast a bureaucracy as a ruling class was not compatible with Marxism then we have identified another important contribution of Draper to democratic Marxism. For in the first volume of Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Draper excavated, in the writings of Marx and Engels, the concept of the ‘autonomized state’. In short, argues Draper, ‘Marx’s theory of the state includes provision for historical conjunctures in which a state, completely independent in the fullest sense, cuts loose from its foundations in civil society and turns on them’.50 In this framework Stalinist Russia involved, ‘the complete freeing of the state power – its autonomization – from all control by any previous existent social class, and the transformation of the state bureaucracy into a new ruling class exploiting the mass of the people’.51 The concept of the ‘autonomized state’ was no Weberian sociology but was present in Marx. Draper’s claim is not that Marx thought the ‘state’ could grow independent of ‘society’ but that, in particular periods of the life-course of modes of production, the state could grow independent of any of the classes of society. State autonomization develops to the greatest extent at times of the dissolution of society caused by an equilibrium between the classes, the ruling class on the wane, the up and coming class not able to rule. At this moment (a moment that can last for centuries) the state can develop autonomously from all classes even as it remains dependent on society and social development as such. The state is rather like a kind of historical backstop which, when the progressive class swings and misses, or does not for conjunctural reasons swing at all, develops as a ‘residual legatee’ of society. Marx and Engels, Draper insists, discussed the autonomized state in (a) the period
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of the dissolution of the Roman Empire leading to ‘the rule of the Praetorians’, (b) the period of the dissolution of feudalism producing the Absolute Monarchies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and (c) the various Bonapartisms of Europe in the nineteenth century in the context of equilibrium between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Perhaps Draper could see this more clearly because for 40 years he had argued that (d) in the twentieth century the decay and dissolution of capitalism, combined with the failure of the working class to take power and reorganize society, had led to full blown bureaucratic collectivism in the east and the bureaucratic collectivization of capitalism in the west. For Draper these were all examples of the autonomized state: a special type of state arising out of ‘the common ruin of the contending classes’. For when a whole civil society disintegrates, the only institution remaining to keep society together is the state: not to keep the old society together any more, but to keep a society, some kind of organized society, together on any terms. The autonomized state becomes the residual legatee of society for a historical period. The political institutionalization of force, the state, infuses all the processes of society and subordinates everything to itself; the political and economic institutions fuse. The state is no longer simply a superstructure: it has swallowed up all of society.52 Draper argued that what is usually taken as the Marxist theory of the state – the managing committee of the ruling class – is only a ‘special theory of the state which applies to normal times and conditions in roughly the same way as Euclidean geometry applies to normal space’.53 The general theory of the state in Marx and Engels views the state as ‘the necessary and logical product of the given social conditions’ and ‘the executor of the economic necessities of the national situation’.54 The relationship between this general theory and the ‘special’ theory of the managing committee is determined by the stage of becoming of the mode of production as it shifts from birth to normality to crisis and supercession through social struggles. Draper characterizes the state in ‘normal’ times as a Caliban to capitalisms’s Prospero. A servant, yes, but one with ‘independent aspirations’.55 In ‘abnormal’ times the state can project a course to autonomization: The more rapid the change – the more revolutionary the times, the more history is caught in the flux of becoming – the more does the special theory [the management committee – A. J.] begin to warp
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away from reality, and the more does the general theory of the state become applicable in order to explain the pattern of political power in the process of social transformation’.56 The importance of all this for a democratic Marxism is touched on by Hodges and Gandy’s comment that ‘the merit of Draper’s study is to call attention to Marx’s gropings toward a sociology of the bureaucracy and to alert contemporary Marxists to the need for a completed social theory’.57 Gandy claims that ‘Draper’s thesis that for Marx the bureaucracy is a class has not received the attention it deserves . . . if a consensus should emerge that Draper is right, Marx would appear more sophisticated than he does to many on the New Left; he would seem a thinker capable of imagining the dangers of bureaucratization in the future’.58 Indeed. The conclusion Draper himself drew from this understanding of state and bureaucracy was uncompromising: ‘In no other era than this does the fight for democracy rise to such a pinnacle of importance for the forces of progress. No other movement in the history of the world [than Marxism – A. J.] is so driven to place the democratic goal so close to everything it strives for’.59
Conclusion: a ‘revolutionary socialism for our day’? The political character of the [WP-] ISL [after 1940] quickly broadened . . . to a wide reinterpretation of the meaning of revolutionary socialism for our day. Reacting sharply against the bureaucratic concepts of both official Stalinism and official Trotskyism, it swung to a deep-going emphasis on the integration of socialism and democracy in all aspects of politics. What was distinctive, however, was that this was accompanied by equally sharp opposition to the American establishment, to American imperialism, to capitalism and its political representatives here. What resulted was a unique combination of revolutionary opposition to both capitalism and Communism.60 Democracy and liberty were the warp and weft of the socialism of the WP-ISL: moral value and eudaimonia, economic and political necessity for socialism, sine qua non of self-emancipation. When Draper said democracy should be ‘desired and defended because it is a vital moral value for humanity’,61 I think he recast democracy, or more precisely the political participation it enables, as something akin to Hannah Arendt’s notion of virtuosity: that playful, artistic, life-affirming human activity by which we know not only political freedom, but know and
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enjoy our/selves.62 But if Arendt knew virtuosity required liberty and a democratic and plural polity (a ‘space of appearances’ as she put it) Draper and the WP-ISL knew that liberty and democracy are crushed and distorted by the imperatives of capital until the ‘space of appearances’ recedes for all but the few. Democracy and liberty require socialism, the co-operative and positive socialization of the economy. But, equally, democracy and liberty are a necessity for socialism, for it is impossible to socialize economic power without democracy. That was the lesson of Stalinism. The specific contradiction of Stalinist society was between the necessity of planning (the only other possible economic regulator, the capitalist market, having been abolished) and the impossibility of planning (the only possible basis of planning, democracy, having also been abolished). Bluntly, democracy is a necessity for socialism because without democracy statification equals totalitarianism. Moreover, the democratic Marxist understood that the democracy which socialism requires is meaningless without liberty: One of my central ideas in regard to what democracy is, is that you cannot have any kind of democracy, none whatsoever, of any type or form, without the political freedom of people to enter into opposition uncontrolled as far as the government is concerned, That would make political democracy not the sole content of but the sine qua non of democracy. . . . One of the essential characteristics of such a political democracy is the right of people to oppose and organize their opposition. Free speech, free assembly . . . come under that head. Free speech without the right to free organization and opposition mean nothing, it is a fake, it is not even free speech. And economic democracy, racial democracy, sexual democracy . . . do not exist, are not really any kind of democracy without these political rights.63 An important intellectual influence on the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964, Draper defended freedom of speech in opposition to Marcuse, who was busy mis-educating the New Left to disregard democratic liberties. Draper insisted that plurality and participation were both necessary to the kind of democracy which could enable selfemancipation. He saw Marcuse as a socialist from above: These elitist types – including the Marcuse types who give their reactionary views a radical cast – fear democratic liberties in their very bones. They are in the full tradition of Carlyle and Ruskin and H. G.
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Wells and similar theoreticians expressing the impotent aspirations of disrooted intellectuals for Platonic kingdoms of the philosopherdespot . . . Revolutionary socialists propose to do the opposite. We want to push to the limit all the presuppositions and practices of the fullest democratic involvement of the greatest mass of people. To the limit: that is, all the way. No progressive social transformation is possible except in so far as the largest mass of plain people from way below in society start moving. And this movement both requires, and also helps to bring about, the fullest opening-up of society to democratic controls from below – not their further restriction.64 In this critique of Marcuse we can see how Draper fuses the social question and political democracy on the ground of self-emancipation. And he did so from a position in not ‘post’ Marx’s thought: ‘Marx’s socialism (communism) as a political program may be most quickly defined . . . as the complete democratization of society, not just of political forms’.65 In 1953 Draper wrote ‘Those who fight to push the frontiers of democratic control further and deeper, not as a rearguard of the past but as a vanguard of a new world will find themselves fighting for a socialist society’.66 The ISL’s fight for civil liberties against McCarthyism showed how that approach was taken into the world and socialism, democracy and liberty articulated as indivisible. Democratic Marxism’s dispute with liberalism, said Julie Jacobson, did not concern the ‘assumption of the intelligence and rationality of man and his inalienable right to act according to the dictates of his own conscience’, but revolved around the relationship between liberty and capitalism. Like Marx, Jacobson refused to treat freedom in the abstract but only in its external relations. From this vantage point he was able to grasp that democratic and individual rights were ‘never broadly applied voluntarily by the bourgeoisie’ but were always won by popular struggle from below, and that capitalist society eroded individual rights. The authoritarian drift of US society after the war demonstrated that ‘The inability of a society based on increasing economic inequality to preserve, let alone extend, individual liberties has proved to be not “Marxist cant” but the ugly reality of the bourgeois world’. Moreover, the failure of US liberals to defend liberal values in the face of the ‘ugly reality’ of the permanent war economy and its political reflex, the militarization of US society, was due to more than a collapse of nerve before the Senator from Wisconsin. Their ambivalence, argued Jacobson, was rooted in the ‘inherent contradiction in the philosophy’ of liberalism: the defence of economic liberty was corroding the defence
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of political liberty. Jacobson concluded that ‘socialists must take up the defense of liberal values’ abandoned by ‘their one-time exponents . . . demonstrating how the fight for truly liberal values is inseparable from the fight against capitalism for socialism’.67 Albert Camus once remarked that ‘The great event of the twentieth century was the forsaking of the values of freedom by the revolutionary movements’, adding mournfully ‘since that moment a certain hope has disappeared from the world and a solitude has begun for each and every man’.68 Perhaps the historic importance of the WP-ISL is that it was a revolutionary movement which did not forsake the values of freedom but rooted its Marxism in them. The organization was founded on the question McLennan treats as beyond Marxism, ‘the theoretical role of democracy in the class analysis of politics’. Marginalized in the twentieth century this democratic Marxism might attract a new generation of rebels in the twenty-first century. It has a rich legacy to offer all those who seek an escape from the cul-de-sac of ‘proletarian economy’ (which failed to link socialism to democracy or liberty) but are reluctant to travel in the direction of post-Marxism (which has shown little interest in linking democracy and liberty to socialism). A twenty-first century socialism from below must articulate socialism, democracy and liberty in a political project on the social ground of the ‘real fighting movements’ of it’s own time. That ongoing project of selfemancipation will find a mighty resource in Hal Draper’s writings which are ‘as sustained an articulation of socialism from below as exists in English’.69
Notes 1. Gregor McLennan, Marxism, Pluralism and Beyond. Classic Debates and New Departures (Cambridge, Polity, 1989) p. 114; Perry Anderson, ‘Trotsky’s Interpretation of Stalinism’, New Left Review 139, 1983, p. 52; Oliver Macdonald, ‘Eastern Bloc Symposium’, Workers Liberty, 12–13, p. 31; Hal Draper, ‘ProTitoism and Democracy’, The New International, July–Aug. 1950, p. 242. I would like to thank the participants at the 1998 Political Studies Association Marxism Specialist Group Conference held at Edge Hill University College, as well as Sean Matgamna, Ernest Haberkern, and Debbie Williams for discussions about these ideas, though only the last would share all of them. 2. Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing (London, Collins Harvill, 1986) p. 69. 3. See Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Volume 1. State and Bureaucracy (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1977); Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Volume 2. The Politics of Social Classes (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1978); Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Volume 3. The ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1986); Karl Marx’s Theory of Revo-
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4.
5.
6.
7. 8.
9.
10.
11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
lution Volume 4. Critique of Other Socialisms (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1990). Stanley Aronowitz, The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism (London, Routledge, 1996) p. 208. The group was called the Workers’ Party from 1940 until 1949 when it changed its name to Independent Socialist League in recognition of the reality that it was a fighting propaganda group and not a political party. Useful introductions are The Fate of the Russian Revolution. Lost Texts of Critical Marxism, Volume 1, edited by Sean Matgamna (London, Phoenix Press, 1998); Hal Draper, Socialism from Below, edited by Ernest E. Haberkern (New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1992); P. Drucker, Max Shachtman and His Left. A Socialist’s Odyssey Through The ‘American Century’ (New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1994); Alan Johnson, ‘ “Neither Washington Nor Moscow”: The Third Camp as History and a Living Legacy’, New Politics VII/3. Summer 1999; Alan Johnson, ‘The Fate of the Russian Revolution’, Historical Materialism 5, Summer 2000. See also Introduction to Independent Socialism, edited by Hal Draper, 1963 (note 60), a collection of articles from Labor Action, its weekly newspaper. This can be obtained from the Center for Socialist History, 1250 Addison Street, Berkeley, California 94702. The author is preparing an intellectual biography of Hal Draper. Hal Draper, The Two Souls of Socialism (Bookmarks, 1996) p. 4. The essay first appeared in Anvil, the magazine of the Young Peoples Socialist League of the American Socialist Party, Winter 1960. Hal Draper, unpublished notes written in preparation for The Two Souls of Socialism, no date. The Draper archive in Berkeley is being organized under the leadership of Ernest Haberkern and Marty Lipow. Ibid. Hal Draper, ‘The Myth of Lenin’s “Concept of the Party” or What They Did to What is to be Done?’, Historical Materialism 4. Winter 1999; see also Hal Draper, ‘Marx, “Marxism” and Trade Unions’, in Socialism from Below (note 4). See Hal Draper (ed.), Independent Socialism and War (Berkeley, Independent Socialist Press, 1966); Hal Draper, America as Overlord. From Yalta to Vietnam (Berkeley, Independent Socialist Press, 1989); and Johnson, ‘Neither Washington Nor Moscow’ (note 4). Draper wrote extensively on the new movements of the 1960s. See Berkeley: The New Student Revolt (New York, Grove Press, 1965); ‘FSM: Freedom Fighters or Misguided Rebels’, New Politics Winter 1965; ‘In Defense of the “New Radicals” ’ New Politics 3, 1965; ‘Marxist Women versus Bourgeois Feminism’, Socialist Register, 1976. Hal Draper, unpublished notes for a draft of a 15 chapter book on the two souls of socialism, no date, p. 15. Draper, The Two Souls of Socialism (note 5), p. 10. Norberto Bobbio, Liberalism and Democracy (London, Verso, 1990) p. 49. Draper, The Two Souls of Socialism (note 5), p. 5. Ibid. p. 11. Ernest Haberkern is currently preparing the fifth and sixth volumes of Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution from Draper’s notes. They will examine Marx’s political theory of war and revolution, the road to socialism, party organization and the socialist society.
Democratic Marxism: the Legacy of Hal Draper 219 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.
29.
30.
31.
32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.
39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.
Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Volume 1 (note 3), p. 59. Ibid. Ibid. p. 283. Hal Draper, ‘Charity, Welfare State, and the walls of Jericho’, Labor Action, 7 July, 1952. Draper, Karl Marx‘s Theory of Revolution Volume 1 (note 3), p. 226. Hal Draper, ‘The Independent Socialist Outlook. Theses on the Struggle for the World in the present Epoch of Capitalism and Stalinism’, Forum, April 1967. Norman Geras, ‘Democracy and the Ends of Marxism’, New Left Review 203, 1994, p. 97. Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Volume 1 (note 3), p. 101. Ibid. pp. 275–81. Draper, Socialism from Below (note 4), p. 258; Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Volume 1 (note 3), p. 234. McLennan, Marxism, Pluralism and Beyond (note 1), p. 113. Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution. Volume 3 (note 3); Hal Draper, The ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ from Marx to Lenin (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1987). The idea that Marx’s concept of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ was systematically misunderstood can also be found in Sidney Hook’s 1934 article ‘Workers Democracy’ in The Modern Monthly, and in Lucien Laurat’s Marxism and Democracy (Left Book Club, 1940). Hal Draper, ‘Joseph Weydemeyer’s “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” ’, Labor History 3/2, 1962, p. 213. See also Hal Draper, ‘Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, New Politics, Summer 1962. Engels, in Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution. Volume 3 (note 3), p. 318. Draper makes the case that Engels is referring here to the Paris Commune, the common assumption that he meant 1789 being wrong. Draper, The ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ from Marx to Lenin (note 28), p. 44. Ibid. p. 44. Ibid. pp. 39–41, 68–75. Ibid. p. 90. Ibid. p. 91. Ibid. p. 142. See also Sam Farber’s Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy (Cambridge, Polity, 1990). Herman Benson, The Communist Party at the Crossroads: Toward Democratic Socialism or Back to Stalinism (New York, Independent Socialist League, 1957) p. 29. S. Matgamna, The Fate of the Russian Revolution (note 4), pp. 40–114. Trotsky, in Matgamna, The Fate of the Russian Revolution (note 4), p. 550. Joseph Carter, ‘Bureaucratic Collectivism’ (1941) in Matgamna, The Fate of the Russian Revolution (note 4), p. 217. Ibid. p. 110. Carter, in ibid. p. 296. Max Shachtman ‘Is Russia a Workers’ state?’ (1940), in ibid. pp. 277–9. Ibid. p. 283. Carter, in ibid. p. 296. Max Shachtman, ‘The Party we Need’ (1944) in ibid. p. 372–3. The original
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48. 49. 50. 51.
52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.
title was ‘The Party that won victory: Lenin’s contribution to the revolution’, and it appeared first in The New International, Nov. 1944. Ibid. p. 374. See Matgamna’s discussion, ibid. pp. 101–3. Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Volume 1 (note 3), pp. 460–1. Hal Draper, ‘The Independent Socialist Outlook. Theses on the Struggle for the World in the present Epoch of Capitalism and Stalinism’, Forum, April 1967. Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Volume 1 (note 3), pp. 467–8. Ibid. p. 587. Engels, in ibid. p. 587. Ibid. pp. 318–21. Draper in ibid. Donald Hodges and Ross Gandy, review of Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Volumes 1 and 2, Science and Society 46/4, Winter 1982–83, p. 481. Ross Gandy, review of Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Volumes 1 and 2, Telos 50, Winter 1981–82, p. 213. Hal Draper (ed.), Introduction to Independent Socialism (Berkeley, Independent Socialist Press, 1963) p. 65. Ibid. p. 7. Ibid. p. 66. Hannah Arendt, ‘Freedom and Politics’, in D. Miller (ed.), Liberty (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991) pp. 64–5. Hal Draper, Transcript of Debate at Centre for Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara (unpublished, May 4, 1962). Draper, Socialism from Below (note 4), p. 172, emphasis added. Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Volume 1 (note 3), p. 282. Draper (ed.), Introduction to Independent Socialism (note 60), p. 78. Julius Falk (Julius Jacobson), ‘Capitalism’s Threat to Democracy’, Labor Action, 4 May 1953, p. 3. emphasis added. Albert Camus, in Irving Howe (ed.), A Margin of Hope. An Intellectual Autobiography (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1982) p. 132–3. Justin Schwartz, ‘Socialism as Self-Emancipation’, Against The Current, Jan.–Feb. 1994, p. 46.
11 Femininities: a Way of Linking Socialism and Feminism? Mark Cowling
The decline of socialist feminism When second wave feminism emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s Marxist or Socialist feminism was a vigorous part of the new ideas which emerged. By the late 1990s publishers’ catalogues usually contained only some socialist feminist classics plus one or two books at most which aimed to revive materialist feminism. The reasons for this are legion, and a thorough analysis of them would take up the whole chapter. In no particular order, the following are certainly important. Then, Communist societies could be held up as a distorted but possibly promising illustration of the possibilities held out by communism for women: the percentage of Russian doctors or engineers who were women, good collective child care facilities and the ready availability of abortion could be seen as positive features, even if the lack of consumer goods, unreconstructed Russian males and the lack of democracy rendered Russia ultimately unattractive as a model. With the collapse of communism, however, the long and bloody history of the revolution and then of Stalinism could hardly be seen as a price worth paying to achieve a society whose leaders finally gave up on their own system, still less the dreadful suffering caused by the postCommunist Russian economy of today. A second set of problems has to do with whether Marxism provides a satisfactory description and set of guidelines for today’s capitalist societies. Whether one turns to the class structure with the decline of the industrial working class and rise of a new middle class of technicians, teachers and service workers, the economic analysis with its problems about the declining rate of profit and the transformation of value into price, or the political analysis which has problems making sense of 221
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functioning western democracies, and which tends towards dictatorial solutions particularly unattractive to socialists, Marxism does not look promising as a resource for feminists. A third set of problems has to do more specifically with the relative lack of analysis of divisions other than class divisions in traditional Marxism, and difficulties which arise when one starts to put together feminist ideas with Marxist ideas. Notable problems include the question of human nature, with feminists having reservations about the alienation analysis which presents creative labour as the central feature of humanity, together with the problem that there must surely be much more to be said about the gender aspect of human nature than Marxism attempts. Engels’s account of the origins of sexual divisions is clearly historically flawed. Marxism does not even attempt to address issues which feminists rightly see as very important, such as sexual or domestic violence. The attempt to make sense of domestic labour in terms of a Marxist analysis of productive and unproductive labour is widely seen as an unproductive discussion. The rather wider idea of seeing family life as a reproduction condition of capitalism looked more promising, but capitalism has such flexible reproduction conditions that the debate failed to produce definite conclusions. A fourth set of problems stems from developments within feminism which render it more divided and less interested in any sort of links with Marxism. The more feminists are influenced by cultural feminism, that is, the idea that women have qualities different from men and which include nurturance and closeness to nature, the less they are likely to be attracted to a doctrine which has little to say about these. A significant line of criticism of mainstream feminism has come from black, lesbian or disabled women who argue that white middle-class women fail to represent them adequately. Although some of bell hooks’ writing seems influenced by Marxism, these critics generally are not. These writers raise the problem of what it means to be female at all, which leads on to some feminists adopting versions of postmodernism. Postmodernism is inimical to a grand narrative such as Marxism, and also looks to dividing people into a series of fluid, limited, local identities which render a coherent feminism problematical, let alone socialist or Marxist feminism. Given this series of difficulties, the idea of reconstructing a viable and widely accepted socialist, still less Marxist feminism seems hopeless. The aims of this chapter are very much more modest. I want to start by drawing attention to features of patriarchy which are recognized by some feminists but which have consequences which are less generally
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realized. I then want to consider the idea of femininity, and to argue that just as writers on masculinities have found it necessary to talk of ‘masculinities’, so, increasingly, it is necessary to talk of ‘femininities’. I then want to argue that this is of some significance for the sort of society which is likely to emerge over the next few years, and for possible socialist and feminist strategies within it. I do not think that the overall result, even if my tentative building blocks are accepted as valid, could be seen as a reconstituted Marxist feminism. However, they do offer a way of looking at the economic aspects of women’s lives which bears some remote resemblance to Engels’s idea that women’s liberation will be associated with their movement into public labour.
Patriarchy: crumbling around the edges? The general account of patriarchy which I broadly endorse is that best articulated by Sylvia Walby. Walby defines patriarchy as ‘a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women’. She stresses social structure to emphasize a rejection of biological determinism and of ‘the notion that every individual man is in a dominant position and every woman in a subordinate one’.1 She identifies six patriarchal social structures: the household mode of production, paid work, the state, male violence, sexuality and cultural institutions. These six structures ‘have causal effects upon each other, both reinforcing and blocking, but are relatively autonomous’.2 This last sentence is tremendously important. If the different structures are seen as relatively autonomous, then it is possible for women to advance on one front, perhaps becoming more equal in paid work, without (for example) this automatically making them immune from male violence.3 The idea of blocking is also very interesting. In her Patriarchy at Work Walby shows that employers tend to want equal opportunities for women so as to best exploit them as workers, and to increase competition among employees. In contrast, certainly in the nineteenth century, husbands and trade unionists (an overlapping group) wanted to exclude women from paid work, or from the best positions. The idea that there are causal effects demands that we should analyse to what extent, for example, state activity in the UK now facilitates women’s access to employment, whereas in the nineteenth century it restricted this access.4 Obviously both these observations conflict with any simplistic uniting of Marxism and feminism. Walby’s six structures seem to me to offer a good understanding of contemporary societies, but there is nothing to stop the list being
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modified in case of need: one might, for example, want to include a specific structure for the position of women in the mosque to gain an understanding of modern Iran. Broadly, for Western countries, she identifies an overall shift from private to public patriarchy, which has involved the inclusion of women in many aspects of the public sphere, but in subordinated roles.5 Walby thus preserves the central insight of second wave feminism, that is, that modern Western societies where women have the vote and broadly equal legal rights remain patriarchal, while avoiding the sweeping essentialism and apparent biological determinism of, for example, the Dworkin/MacKinnon approach. She also accepts that factors other than ‘patriarchy’ affect women’s position. She comments, for example, that among Western nations, the wages gap between men and women ‘is least in the Scandinavian countries and greatest in the USA, with the rest of Western Europe, including Britain, in between’.6 There is not the space here to discuss Walby’s more detailed analysis of the six areas – indeed, her book inevitably leaves readers with a good knowledge of any of the areas feeling that there is much more to be said. Rather, I want to use Walby’s basic approach, but to argue that it needs to be extended into some sample analyses of what one might call ‘micropolitics’ – specific situations which apply to individual people or to small groups. I want to offer three examples. The first concerns some limited aspects of my life. I have recently been working on a book on date rape.7 One chapter looks at the background against which sexual negotiation occurs.8 Writers such as Dworkin and MacKinnon argue that sexual negotiation occurs on such a sloping playing field that even ‘consenting’ intercourse under patriarchy is effectively rape. As a general approach I criticize this view by endorsing Walby’s view of patriarchy instead. One clear implication of Walby’s view is that some patriarchal societies are less patriarchal than others, so that, for example, contemporary Britain, although men still dominate in most positions of power, is less oppressive than either nineteenth century Britain or modern-day Saudi Arabia. This in turn suggests that it is worth analysing how it might be possible to turn a more patriarchal society into a less patriarchal one. However, a further implication of the Walby approach is that within any one particular patriarchal society the specific situation of individual men or women will vary from the ‘average’, even if such a concept, given the six structures of power, makes sense. Applying this to aspects of my life, it is clear that although men generally hold positions of power in our society, the main immediate positions of power in my life
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– Director of the School in which I work, Deputy Director, the only proVice Chancellor I have had any real dealings with, the people at publishers who decide the fate of my writings, are women.9 Maybe these are token women. Perhaps they are forced to implement patriarchal procedures. However, I am sure that if I was female and they were male, I would use them as examples of the personal effect of patriarchy in my life. In other words, I live in a somewhat less patriarchal society in some respects than the ‘average’ would suggest. The second and third examples of micropolitics developed from Walby’s approach concern two hypothetical women, both of whom live with men. The first suffers extensive domestic and sexual violence, the second does not. There are a whole series of reasons for this. The first woman does not work outside the home and has young children. She has no resources of her own, and it is thus very difficult for her to leave, whatever her husband’s conduct. The second works at a good, secure job, which pays better than her partner’s, a situation now enjoyed by one in five British women.10 Her partner knows that if he engages in unacceptable behaviour it is fairly easy for her to leave. Ideologically, the first woman and her partner have traditional notions about domestic roles, whereas the second couple broadly accept feminist ideas. The first woman’s partner is much stronger and heavier than her, and an exboxer; the second woman happens to be stronger and heavier than her husband, and used to be a karate champion. At least so far as domestic life is concerned, the second woman seems to have left large aspects of patriarchy behind her. Again, it should be stressed that this second hypothetical comparison is not claimed to be typical. In contrast, four-fifths of women with partners earn less than them, and whatever statistical approach one adopts, there is no doubt that domestic and sexual violence is widespread. The point is rather that people in our society live in increasingly varied domestic and work situations; the bald fact that Britain is a patriarchal society is becoming increasingly uninformative about a range of situations which individuals encounter. A whole series of indicators support this point, suggesting that British women are becoming more diverse thanks to their own efforts rather than thanks to their husbands or to diversity outside their control. Writing as recently as 1987, Pamela Abbott and Roger Sapsford argued a point which at the time was relatively new and controversial: that an account of the class structure which failed to take account of women’s position is not adequate.11 None the less, their attempt to provide such an account, based on data from the early 1980s, includes comments
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such as: ‘gender rather than marital status or even part-time employment seems to be the key factor in labour market segmentation’,12 ‘few women achieve professional or managerial positions, compared with men’,13 ‘. . . modern Britain is to some extent two societies, partitioned by gender, and . . . the female one is very much less open and permeable than the male one’.14 Partly thanks to critics such as Abbott and Sapsford, the Office for National Statistics has now accepted Economic and Social Research Council proposals for a revision of the classification of class. Basing their criteria for classification on security, promotion opportunities and autonomy, rather than a manual-non-manual divide or relative earnings, the ESRC team has included librarians, social workers and teachers in ‘higher professionals’, a recognition of the status of the many women in these occupations. If this new classification is accepted, and used retrospectively, then the proportion of ‘higher managerial and professional’ workers in the general workforce has expanded from 1984 to 1999 from 9 to 22 per cent. Over the same period among women workers the rise was from 4 to 18 per cent, although twice as many women as men remain in ‘routine occupations’.15 In parallel with this shift, the Institute of Management’s figures show women forming 8 per cent of managers in 1990 and almost 20 per cent today.16 In contrast to women’s generally lower pay than men, childless, professional women under 24 earn 104 per cent as much as their male counterparts.17 Attitudes also support greater equality, with only one person in four believing that a man should earn the money and a woman should look after home and family – and egalitarian comments are more common among the young. Childlessness is not seen by most people as causing people to lead ‘empty lives’. Women make up 34 per cent of solicitors, whilst 60 per cent of those entering the profession are women.18 The potential for further shifts in this picture is suggested by the shift to women students now making up a small majority of entrants to higher education.19 The idea of the micropolitics of patriarchy also allows for other features of the second hypothetical woman’s life which are less satisfactory: her MP is an unreconstructed male chauvinist Conservative, her father does not approve of aspects of her lifestyle, she has just been irritated by a patronizing car salesman who talked to her husband as if she did not exist. How much she is affected by ‘living in a patriarchal society’ will depend considerably, given its patchy quality, on her aims in life, her preferences, and perhaps simply on luck (she likes golf and
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rugby: her local golf club has a bad record where women are concerned, but the local rugby club is proud of its women’s team). Her experience of patriarchy is also likely to merge into other features of life. For example, her doctor is male, elderly and possibly less conscientious about women’s medical problems than he should be. She is therefore left with a mild medical problem. Possibly if she made the effort to change doctors the problem could be righted, or possibly it is just one of those things with which one has to live. Similarly, we all know of people of both sexes who have had the luck to be appointed to jobs for which they seem to be underqualified, and of people who seem to thoroughly deserve employment which they just keep missing. Some of these instances are likely to get mixed up with questions linked to patriarchy: perhaps a particular woman is unable to get a better job because employers guess she will experience childcare problems. However, while in extreme cases it is clear someone is suffering discrimination, frequently discrimination is one possible cause among others of her failure to get a job. Looked at in this micropolitical way, a society which is ‘on average’ patriarchal – genuinely patriarchal, and needing specific changes to make it more equal – may be experienced as anything from extremely patriarchal to hardly patriarchal at all by specific people in specific circumstances. I am by no means alone in making observations of this sort. Rosalind Coward in her recent book Sacred Cows20 uses a picture of an unevenly patriarchal society similar to that painted above to argue that feminist doctrines need to be modified to take account of social changes which have implemented much of the feminist agenda and disadvantaged some men. She can be criticized for relying too much on limited evidence, playing down the degree to which patriarchy has remained and being unclear how much she is writing about the UK and how much about Western capitalist societies generally. None the less, her book raises issues which socialists (and feminists) should take seriously. In the next section I want to offer one suggestion for getting to grips with a patchily patriarchal society.21
Underpinning variety: the idea of femininities One major response of men interested in feminism is to investigate masculinity. A precise definition of masculinity is contentious. For those who accept a distinction between sex and gender, it would be the culturally determined gender which goes in our society with biological
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maleness. However, more recent thinking sees the body as more closely implicated in masculinity than this would suggest. Perhaps it is best to start with a brief account of Connell, one of the leading analysts of masculinity. A point which emerges immediately in analyses of masculinity is that in our society at least there is no single masculinity: one cannot make sense of the idea without thinking about a plurality of masculinities. Connell’s view in his Masculinities22 is that biological maleness is a (somewhat) flexible given,23 which is then mediated by class and race. But beyond this, men have a range of choices as to how they come to terms with given masculinities. There are, for instance, oppositional masculinities so that working class boys at school may grow up accepting the school’s version of masculinity or opting for an alternative subcultural version.24 Thus a man can decide to aim for a conventional career with a wife who brings up his children and acts as his support, or to work at low pay on environmental projects in a feminist atmosphere, or to try to join an elite army corps, or to adopt an overtly gay lifestyle. Obviously these choices are not entirely free (the conventional career man may be unemployed, the man may have no interest in being gay, the army rejects many recruits because of lack of physical fitness etc.). They are also not immutable. Inside the conventional career man there may be a transvestite rock star just waiting to be born. However, any particular man’s resources will be much affected by the choices he has made up to that point: he may be fit, poor, well educated, have a prison record etc. Connell thinks that particular societies may have a hegemonic masculinity, that is, the form of masculinity which currently legitimates patriarchy.25 I am not entirely happy with this, given the above acceptance of Walby’s account in which there are several structures of patriarchy – a view which one would imagine Connell, with his stress on structured diversity, would find congenial. It seems to me that a ‘hegemonic’ masculinity which is tolerant of considerable diversity is very lightly hegemonic. Perhaps some sense can be made of the idea of hegemonic masculinity another way: there would seem to be at least a family resemblance between the various masculinities, and it is this which allows them to be recognized as masculinities rather than, say, femininities or behaviour appropriate to ducks. Hegemonic masculinity would thus be that limited overlap which sticks the various masculinities together, rather than the sort of heavily hegemonic masculinity more characteristic of, say, Britain in the 1950s.26 This idea has been less taken up by feminists looking at women. In
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contrast, there has been much debate generated amongst feminists based on the idea of diversity, that is that not all women are white, middle class and heterosexual. Thus women who are working class, or belong to particular ethnic groups, or are lesbian or disabled argue that their specific oppression has been ignored by their more privileged sisters. One of the most prominent critics taking this line has been bell hooks.27 A particularly poignant example is the black American poet Audre Lorde’s open letter to Mary Daly, accusing her of assimilating the specific oppression suffered by particular groups of women to ‘the oppression of women’, whereas white middle-class women basically do not share these forms of oppression.28 Mary Daly seems to have ignored this criticism. The diversity which Audre Lorde stresses is a given diversity: women cannot choose to be born black or white or American or Ethiopian. Her argument is particularly powerful because of this: she is accusing Daly of misappropriating forms of oppression which have not been chosen. Apart, however, from this important given diversity, women are increasingly divided by what can be described as chosen forms of femininity. On the analogy of the discussion of masculinity, women are born biologically female but have quite a degree of choice about what form of femininity they aim to adopt. There is in advanced capitalist countries a range of choices open to girls in their teens: do they opt for increased leisure and relatively low achievement, perhaps followed by early motherhood, or do they aim to enter the race for qualifications and jobs? A further choice for young women who opt into education and competition for jobs is what to do about motherhood: do they opt out of longterm relationships with men and opt out of parenthood? or opt for planned single parenthood? or aim to be supported by a partner for some time while their children are young, followed by returning to work? or aim to carry on working except for very short breaks around the time of birth of their children? As with the male choices discussed earlier, any one of these choices may come unstuck for reasons beyond the control of the individual woman. However, many choices are successful, and the outcomes again have implications in terms of the resources a particular woman can command at any one time. These choices are much less constrained today than they were in the early 1960s, let alone the 1860s. A further range of choices is that between career paths. In modern Britain the major excluded areas for women are the Catholic priesthood and some parts of the armed forces. Outside this there is a wide range of choices, which in turn bring with them varying degrees of security,
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financial reward, stress, leisure, etc. They may also be seen as different ways of being feminine: being caring, reliable, presentable, organized, sisterly, maternal and so forth. For many women there are also careerrelated choices to be made about their sexuality: do they risk a job where sexual harassment is particularly likely? Do they aim for a career where their gender is entirely irrelevant? Do they specifically use their sexuality for career advancement or as part of the job itself? A very impressive example of choosing between possible patterns of femininity – in this case between patterns of working motherhood – which I have witnessed over the years is the choice open to some working class women to undergo higher education. Most of my best students over the years have been women who left school with few qualifications who return to higher education later in life. Despite having to juggle with family commitments and lack of money, many of them are the best students I have the good fortune to teach, and go on to become teachers, social workers, personnel officers, local authority officials, etc. They thus move from the insecurities and low pay of unskilled women’s work to relatively stable and well-paid jobs – indeed, in terms of the new classifications discussed above to becoming ‘higher professionals’ in many cases. Obviously not all working class women are capable of, or have access to, higher education, so we are not looking at an entirely free choice. However, the women I teach generally end up commanding much better resources in life than others who choose not to follow this path. The idea of divergent chosen femininities has not been much explored in the literature, despite the fact that the BIDS database has no less than 840 social sciences articles which include discussion of femininity between 1983 and October 1998. Many authors basically follow the approach of Susan Brownmiller in Femininity, who sees femininity as a unified phenomenon constraining all women: . . . this entire enquiry has been haunted by the question of ambition, for every adjustment a woman makes to prove her feminine difference adds another fine stitch to the pattern: an inhibition on speech and behaviour, a usurpation of time, a preoccupation with appearance that deflects the mind and depletes the storehouse of energy and purpose . . . there is no getting around the fact that ambition is not a feminine trait.29 Usually femininity is discussed in a way which allows for some diversity in ways of being feminine, but without allowing these to detract
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from femininity as a unitary phenomenon. Quite often the key point is to distinguish between femininity and masculinity, in order to show that people, or even words, with more of one or the other also share some other trait, so that the writer is implicitly allowing for the idea of varying femininities but actually suppressing it.30 The idea of androgyny is often involved in this move: individuals are said to have more or less feminine or masculine qualities irrespective of their actual sex.31 This can lead to some counterintuitive conclusions, for example that ambitious and competent female nurses are ‘masculine’,32 or that women students whose use of make-up is more frequent and varied are more ‘masculine’.33 It seems possible that a divide might open between the research concept of femininity, meaning, perhaps, a communal orientation instead of one directed to achievement, and the characteristics of large numbers of real women: this is sometimes recognized in the literature.34 My feeling is that an acknowledgement of a variety of femininities, some of which doubtless include some stereotypically ‘male’ aspects, would fit better with real life. The keenness to maintain femininity as a unitary phenomenon may be seen in titles such as ‘Rejecting Femininity – Some Research Notes On Gender Identity Development In Lesbians’,35 or ‘Magnolias And Microchips – Regional Subcultural Constructions of Femininity’,36 or in talking of ‘tensions’ in femininity37 (in articles where it would be possible to write of divergent femininities), ‘Perceived Effects on Femininity of the Participation of Women in Sport’,38 ‘Femininity, Place And Commodities – A Retail Case-Study’39 (where there is an obvious background conception of some sport as unfeminine and of consumption as inherently feminine, rather than of femininity as varied), femininity is seen as something to be ‘achieved’ as in ‘Clinical Observations on Interferences of Early Father Absence in the Achievement of Femininity’,40 or an avowedly poststructuralist article which uses the concept of ‘mainstream femininity’.41 The idea of a multiplicity of femininities does surface from time to time in the literature, sometimes almost by accident, usually in contexts where groups of women have clearly forged an identity for themselves which differs from what other commentators might term ‘mainstream femininity’. Examples of this include differing styles developed by women of different classes in La Paz;42 women are said to be likely to question traditional concepts of masculinity and femininity as they move into the workforce;43 the photographer Esther Bubley is said to have captured a specifically working-class form of femininity in the early 1940s;44 Norweigan women who have started doing ‘male’ work
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on farms have constructed a new form of femininity which allows them to be as good at farming as men whilst retaining a view of themselves as women;45 a similar reconstruction of femininity happens with AfroWest Indian women recruited to the offshore informatics industry;46 slave femininity as it emerged in the West Indies is argued to be different from non-slave femininity.47 How could the various femininities be identified? What follows should be seen as a crude first attempt, to be improved if others think the idea promising. One approach might be to look at the criteria used in establishing varied masculinities, such as age, fatherhood or lack of it, employment, etc. As these categories are only interesting if they have a cultural element, another cue could be taken from the diversification in recent years of women’s magazines. Thus one could distinguish teenagers (e.g. Just Seventeen), young adults/older teenagers (e.g. Mizz), younger single professional women (e.g. Cosmopolitan), older women with children and less of a career (e.g. Woman, Bella), and pensioners (e.g. The People’s Friend). As with masculinities there are overlaps between these groups, and it should not be assumed that membership of a group wholly determines conduct – the conventional mother with a part-time job may be about to start life as an anti-roads protester, living up a tree. Given these different approaches to life and the diversity of individual circumstances and fortunes discussed in the previous section, it is hardly surprising that women are attracted by a variety of feminisms rather than just one. I would suggest that, with hindsight, early second wave feminism – and, probably, first wave feminism – maintained a greater degree of unity than is realistic at present because women’s condition was more closely tied to their biology: if unreliable contraception failed to push women towards motherhood and domesticity, then social constraints largely succeeded in getting them there. I am not ignoring women who had careers before the 1960s, nor am I neglecting that many working class women worked outside the home for much of their adult lives. However, for most women before about 1970 the idea of having a career which would rival any man’s whilst also managing to raise a couple of children was not a serious option.
Conclusion A whole range of issues is raised by the above analysis. To what extent are there still feminist issues which affect all women, and to what extent have feminist issues become ones which affect particular groups in
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particular ways, so that childcare in the abstract is a general issue, but the specific problem of the Blairs and the Horlicks is not really in the same league as that of single mothers on an isolated council estate? Presumably there may still be a mild hegemonic femininity parallel to the hegemonic masculinity discussed above, but it probably does not provide a basis for very extensive sisterhood. Would the idea of femininities help to make sense of the debates which have divided feminists, such as those between feminists who see pornography as the major underpinning of patriarchy and those keen to develop porn for women? If there are varying femininities, should socialists back some and oppose others? I would tentatively suggest that socialists should back a femininity which sees full participation in the economy outside the home as desirable, and which looks to society to provide some of the underpinnings which make that possible: improved maternity leave, paternity leave, social help with pre- and after-school childcare, provision of some sick leave for either parent to care for sick children etc. From this would flow the benefit to individual women of greater equality, of more power to avoid, alter or leave domestic situations which they find unacceptable, and of more muscle as trade unionists and as consumers in their own right. The idea of socialism based on militant class struggle may perhaps be passé, but this scenario is likely to produce greater class divisions between women in their own right, or between households where the female income forms a crucial part of the whole, and a socialist government could at minimum look to taxing better-off households more heavily to provide improved public child (and infirm adult) care for the less well off.
Notes 1. Sylvia Walby, Theorising Patriarchy (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 20. 2. Ibid. p. 20. 3. And conversely ‘. . . it is not appropriate to see male violence as the basis of other forms of men’s control over women’; private male violence has been (rather ineffectually) delegitimated, because of state intervention. (Ibid. pp. 143, 149). Cf. Walby, Patriarchy at Work (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1986) pp. 60–66. 4. Walby, Theorising Patriarchy (note 1), pp. 41, 51. For Walby’s much more extended analysis of this development, see her excellent Patriarchy at Work (note 3). 5. Walby, Theorising Patriarchy (note 1), p. 179. 6. Ibid. p. 28. Cf. her comments on the effects of different ethnic groups, p. 181, and her comment in Patriarchy at Work (note 3) ‘. . . patriarchy is
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7. 8. 9.
10. 11.
12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.
20. 21.
22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.
never the only mode in a society but always exists in articulation with another, such as capitalism’ (p. 50). Mark Cowling, Date Rape and Consent (Aldershot, Avebury, 1998). Ibid. ch. 5. I should stress that there is every reason to believe that all these women hold their positions on merit and are generally doing a good job. I am not complaining, merely making an observation. See, for example, Helen Wilkinson, ‘Cracks in the Glass Ceiling’, Observer, June 1996. Pamela Abbott and Roger Sapsford, Women and Social Class (London, Tavistock Publications, 1987). They have in mind a conventional account of class rather than a Marxist one. Ibid. p. 72. Ibid. p. 84. Ibid. p. 179. Guardian, 1 Dec. 1998. Observer, 3 Jan. 1999. The same article comments that women have made less of an impact at director level, and that managerial style remains macho. Suzanne Franks, Guardian, 11 Jan. 1999. Guardian, 30 Dec. 1998. Across Europe (i.e. the EU, the EFTA countries and Central and Eastern Europe) there are 103 women for every 100 men in higher education; 110 women hold higher diplomas compared to 100 men. However, qualified women are slightly more prone to be unemployed and top jobs are still male dominated (see Key Data on Education in the European Union, quoted in EC News, No. 8, 27 Feb. 1998). Rosalind Coward, Sacred Cows (London, Harper Collins, 1999). Obviously the major way of getting to grips with a patriarchal society is to analyse its patriarchal structures and then try to change them, something which second wave feminists have been attempting since the early 1970s. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge, Polity, 1995). Ibid. pp. 51, 54, 56. Ibid. pp. 36–7. Ibid. pp. 75 et. seq. David Morgan’s Discovering Men (London, Routledge, 1992) shares many of Connell’s perspectives in a largely British context. bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman? (Boston, MA, South End Press, 1981); bell hooks, Feminist Criticism: From Margin to Center (Boston MA, South End Press, 1984). In Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA, The Crossing Press, 1984). Susan Brownmiller, Femininity (London, Paladin, 1986) p. 172. For example, H. W. Marsh, J. K. Antill and J. D. Cunningham, ‘Masculinity, Femininity, and Androgyny – Relations to Self-Esteem and Social Desirability’, Journal of Personality 55/4, 1987, 661–85, R. O. Baldwin, ‘FemininityMasculinity of Blacks and Whites Over A 14-Year Period’, Psychological Reports 60/2, 1987, 455–8; M. Z. Hackman, T. J. Paterson, M. J. Hills and A. H. Furniss, ‘Leaders, Gender-Role as a Correlate of Subordinates, Perceptions of Effectiveness and Satisfaction’, Perceptual and Motor Skills 77/2, 1993, 671–4; T. Konishi, ‘The Semantics of Grammatical Gender – A Cross-Cultural-Study’, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 22/5, 1993, 519–34.
Femininities 235 31. E.g. Marsh et al., ‘Masculinity, Femininity, And Androgyny’ (note 31); L. K. Lamke, D. L. Sollie, R. G. Durbin and J. A. Fitzpatrick, ‘Masculinity, Femininity and Relationship Satisfaction – The Mediating Role of Interpersonal Competence’, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 11/4, 1994, 535–54; J. J. Spangenberg and T. P. Lategan, ‘Coping, Androgyny, and Attributional Style’, South African Journal of Psychology/Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif Vir Sielkunde 23/4, 1993, 195–203; R. Karniol, R. Gabay, Y. Ochion, and Y. Harari, ‘Is Gender or Gender-Role Orientation a Better Predictor of Empathy in Adolescence?’ Sex Roles 39/1–2, 1998, 45–59. 32. C. Kirchmeyer and C. Bullin, ‘Gender Roles in a Traditionally Female Occupation: A Study of Emergency, Operating, Intensive Care, and Psychiatric Nurses’, Journal of Vocational Behavior 50/1, 1997, 78–95. 33. I. Brdar, M. Tkalcic and P. Bezinovic, ‘Women’s Cosmetics Use and SelfConcept’, Studia Psychologica 38/1–2, 1996, 45–54. 34. J. Pryor, ‘Self-Esteem and Attitudes toward Gender-Roles – Contributing Factors in Adolescents’, Australian Journal of Psychology 46/1, 1994, 48–52. 35. M. Cooper, Deviant Behavior 11/4, 1990, 371–80. 36. S. Middletonkeirn, Sociological Spectrum 6/1, 1986, 83–107. 37. D. A. Leslie, ‘Femininity, Post-Fordism, and the New Traditionalism’, Environment and Planning, Society & Space 11/6, 1993, 689–708. 38. J. M. Pedersen and D. M. Kono, Perceptual and Motor Skills 71/3 Pt. 1, 1990, 783–92. 39. R. Dowling, Antipode 25/4, 1993, 295–319. 40. R. Lohr, C. Legg, A. E. Mendell and B. S. Riemer, Clinical Social Work Journal 17/4, 1989, 351–65. 41. T. Leahy, ‘Taking up a Position – Discourses of Femininity and Adolescence in the Context of Man Girl Relationships’, Gender and Society 8/1, 1994, 48–72. 42. L. Gill, ‘Proper Women and City Pleasures – Gender, Class, and Contested Meanings in La Paz’, American Ethnologist 20/1, 1993, 72–88. 43. I. Miles, ‘Consequences of the Changing Sexual Division of Labor’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 522/1992, 92–103. 44. J. Ellis, ‘Revolutionary Spaces: Photographs of Working-class Women by Esther Bubley 1940–1943’, Feminist Review 53, 1996, 74–94. 45. B. Brandth, ‘Changing Femininity – The Social Construction Of Women Farmers In Norway’, Sociologia Ruralis 34/2–3, 1994, 127–49. 46. C. Freeman, ‘Femininity and Flexible Labor – Fashioning Class Through Gender on the Global Assembly Line’, Critique of Anthropology 18/3, 1998, 245–62. 47. B. Brereton, ‘Gendered Testimonies: Autobiographies, Diaries and Letters by Women as Sources for Caribbean History’, Feminist Review 59, 1998, 143–63.
12 Development of the Productive Forces: An Ecological Analysis Jonathan Hughes
Marxism has long been subject to criticism from the theorists of Political Ecology, and in recent years, as the concerns of Green thinkers have become harder to ignore, Marxists have begun to respond to this challenge, defending and sometimes amending Marxist theory in response to Green criticisms. This chapter addresses one issue within this debate: the controversy over Marx’s commitment to the growth, or development, of the productive forces. My aim is to dispute the contention of Marx’s Green critics, that his concept of the development of the productive forces leads inevitably to the exacerbation of ecological problems, and, more speculatively, to suggest some advantages of using this concept to investigate ecological problems.1
Productive forces, ecology and technology The productive forces consist of labour power and the means of production that labour power utilizes in order to make its products. Since ecological problems are problems arising out of humans’ dealings with nature, it is the natural components of the means of production that concern us. Ted Benton has argued that Marx neglects these natural components, but it seems to me that they can in fact be readily accommodated within Marx’s account of the production process.2 The means of production, according to that account, consist of instruments and objects of labour, and Marx is clear that both of these originate from nature and have a persisting natural component. Objects of labour, or raw materials, are either given directly by nature or are natural objects modified by previous labour processes.3 Instruments of labour include: natural objects such as stones used as tools in primitive labour processes; tools and machines manufactured out of natural materials; and even 236
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the earth itself which serves as an instrument of labour in agriculture. And it is not only things which directly ‘conduct’ the worker’s activity on to its object which Marx recognizes as instruments of labour; he also defines as instruments of labour in a wider sense ‘all the objective conditions necessary for carrying on the labour process’,4 a category which he intends to cover such things as workshops, canals and roads, but which will also without modification include the natural systems, physical, biological and climatic, upon which production depends. These natural components of the production process (shown schematically below) indicate two aspects of the process that make it liable to ecological problems: (a) its dependence on naturally given raw materials, and (b) its dependence on naturally given instruments of production. But there is more. Of the materials used in the productive process only a part ends up in the product, and only some of these materials’ properties are understood and exploited by the producers. The production process is therefore also liable to ecological problems in virtue of
natural raw materials
products (use values)
produced natural instruments
LABOUR ACTIVITY
produced unintended consequences labour power
Note: Solid arrows represent connections noted explicitly in Marx’s account of the labour process: broken arrows represent connections noted elsewhere. Figure 12.1 Ecological impact of the labour process
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(c) its production of pollution and other environmentally detrimental unintended consequences.5 If the development of the productive forces entailed an expansion of each of these ecologically problematic elements – demanding more from nature and having greater unintended impact upon it – then the claim that such a development must inevitably add to our ecological problems would appear to be confirmed, and Marx’s Green critics vindicated. But the premise of this argument warrants further scrutiny. It has yet to be demonstrated that expansion of these ecologically problematic elements is a necessary consequence of the development of the productive forces, and in what follows I will give reasons for doubting that such a tight connection can be made. Marx’s Green critics often perceive historical materialism as a form of technological determinism. Leaving aside the question of determinism, I will argue that it is legitimate to identify development of the productive forces with the development of technology provided the latter is understood in a suitably broad sense. I will, however, argue against the claim that this technological development leads inevitably to a worsening of ecological problems. Some commentators equate technology with tools and machinery, that is with instruments of production.6 Understood in this way, ‘development of technology’ is a narrower concept than Marx’s ‘development of the productive forces’, since the productive forces include labour power as well as instruments. But the development of labour power consists primarily7 in the development of skills and knowledge, and this corresponds to what several commentators have noted is the original meaning of ‘technology’: ‘knowledge about technique’ or ‘knowledge of the industrial arts’.8 In fact, any actual development of technology must involve both the material and human elements, since the development and application of tools and machines are impossible without the knowledge to invent them and the skills to use them,9 and conversely the development of labour power is capable only of limited advance until it avails itself of new instruments of production. The development of technology may therefore be taken to include the development both of the instruments of production, and of labour power. This account of technology still appears to leave one element of the productive forces, namely raw materials, or objects of labour, unaccounted for.10 I think, however, that in so far as Marx’s phrase ‘development of the productive forces’ can meaningfully be applied to raw
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materials, it must refer to such events as the discovery of new resources, of techniques to increase the viability of marginal deposits, and of new uses to which raw materials can be put, developments which are largely made possible by innovations in the instruments and techniques (that is, the technology) of surveying, extraction and manufacture. Such developments can, therefore, be subsumed under the account of technological development given above. What these considerations indicate is that developments of the productive forces are always developments of technology. It follows from this that whatever consequences are universally associated with technological development are associated also with the productive force development to which Marx is committed. Let us then consider what grounds there are for the belief that technological development must be ecologically damaging.
Technological development and environmental damage: an inevitable correlation? One fairly representative argument purporting to establish a necessary connection between technological development and ecological problems is advanced by Val Routley. She argues that the vision of an ‘automated paradise’ offered to us by Marx ‘must be highly energy-intensive and thus given any foreseeable, realistic energy scenario, environmentally damaging’.11 However, while it is true that new technology may, and quite often does, waste more raw material, burn more fuel, and produce more pollution than the technology it replaces, Routley is wrong to assume that this must always be the case. Automation of production involves two elements: the replacement by machines of mental labour and of manual labour. The latter does indeed require the substitution of natural sources of energy for the energy previously supplied by human labour; thus the transition from handicraft production to machine industry implies an increase in the requirement for natural energy resources. But if the starting-point is today’s highly mechanized production, which already is heavily reliant on such resources, the picture is different. In this context, automation must, to a large extent, mean the substitution of machines for the predominantly mental labour which humans expend in controlling or supervising machine production. In this capacity human labour contributes little to the overall energy requirements of the productive process, and it is quite possible that an automatic system will operate in a more energyefficient way than it would under direct human control, more than
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offsetting the relatively small amount of extra energy required to replace the supervisory labour. To take a familiar example, the energy required to perform a gear change on a car is small compared with that required for propulsion; so an automatic gearbox that selected the most energyefficient gear more consistently than a human operator, could yield a reduction in fuel consumption greater than the small amount of extra fuel consumed by the mechanical action of changing gear.12 Routley’s focus on energy use is typical of much ecological argument, but similar considerations apply to other resources. Just as the development of automation may lead to a net saving in energy consumption, so it may lead, by similarly improving efficiency, to savings in the use of other types of resource (that is, raw materials), and to reduced emission of pollutants. This indicates that development of technology has a part to play in dealing with environmental problems; it does not, however, licence the assumption that technological changes alone will be sufficient to resolve ecological problems, since there are theoretical limits to what can be achieved in the way of increased efficiency, and even where improvements are theoretically possible there is no guarantee that the technological means to achieve them will be discovered in time to avert ecological problems, if indeed at all.13 The automation to which Routley (wrongly) objects consists of an increase in the productivity of labour, that is, an increase in the ratio – size of product amount of direct labour repuired to produce it – where this is achieved by means of technical innovation in such a way as to reduce the need for labour power.14 For others, however, the idea that the development of technology necessarily increases its impact on the environment rests on the assumption that the purpose of increasing productivity is to permit an increase in the quantity of goods produced, by loosening the constraint previously imposed by the requirement for labour power.15 Such a development would, other things being equal, lead to an increase in the quantity of resources consumed and an increase in the quantity of waste products. But as we have seen, other things are not always equal, because these consequences may to some degree be offset if the technology that increases labour productivity is also more ecologically efficient. It may therefore be possible to produce more with the same resources or even to produce more with less. Even so, given the limited scope and uncertainty of such
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efficiencies, development of technology aimed at an increase in production must be regarded as potentially problematic. We have considered cases where technological development is aimed either at increasing the size of the product or at reducing the requirement for labour. However, it need not be aimed at increasing labour productivity at all. For even if the Greens’ proposal for a halt to growth of production was enacted, and it was decided to forego further reductions in labour time, it would still be rational to introduce technological innovations designed to increase the efficiency with which resources are used and waste products disposed of, in order to reduce the ecological impact of existing levels of productive activity. Such innovations would appear to deserve the title of ‘technological development’ no less than innovations aimed at maximizing labour productivity. Can this diverse range of objectives really be combined within a unitary concept of ‘technological development’? One writer who has attempted to do just that is I. C. Jarvie. He rejects the view that the appropriate measure of technological development in each case is determined by the branch of technology with which we are dealing, or the essential nature of its product.16 Such a view is unable to account for the fact that the objectives pursued may vary even within a given branch of technology, and that prime importance may be accorded to considerations usually regarded as ‘non-technical’ and certainly extrinsic to the particular branch of technology, considerations such as economics, aesthetics, or (we may add) ecology. Instead, Jarvie argues that the appropriate criteria for measuring technological progress depend upon the concrete problem that is posed to the technologist, a problem that is always posed in a social context: ‘Whether the overriding concern is with accuracy, durability, efficiency, or what, is always dictated by the socially set problem and not the technological field’.17 Jarvie is surely right to insist that the aims pursued by means of technological innovation are various, and that they are determined in large part by the social context in which that innovation takes place. The suggestion that the development of technology be measured according to its achievement of those aims also appears promising, not least in raising the possibility of including the costs of production, broadly conceived to include ecological costs, in the assessment of technological progress. Whether this possibility is realized, however, will depend on whether ecological matters fall within the ‘socially set problem’. This is problematic since in the absence of a consensus among members of society it is unclear how ‘the socially set problem’ should be defined. Different members of society, with different interests and preferences,
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are likely to judge technological innovations according to different criteria. For some the most significant factor will be the qualities and durability of the product while for others it will be the monetary costs of production, the safety and wellbeing of the workers who produce it, or the level of ecological impact. Thus, at a normative level, what counts as development is essentially contestable. Even on a non-normative interpretation it is clear that ‘technological development’ may be defined in various ways, corresponding to the various aims that it may serve. The choice of definition must therefore be justified in terms of the explanatory task for which the definition is required. Our concern is not with technological development as such, but with the kinds of technological development that are implied by Marx’s concept of the development of the productive forces. In order to answer that question we must therefore move our focus away from technological development itself and on to the latter concept and the role that it plays in Marx’s theory of history.
Development of the productive forces: the revolutionary function Marx’s best known discussion of the role of the productive forces is in the 1859 Preface, where he writes that the ‘relations of production . . . correspond to a definite stage of development of [the] material productive forces’.18 The productive forces thus serve in some sense to explain the prevailing relations of production (which in turn explain the legal and political superstructure and forms of social consciousness). Marx’s primary interest, however, is not in explaining individual social forms, but in the transition from one to another. This transition is explained by the development of the productive forces. The development of the productive forces explains changes in the relations of production because it creates the conditions in which such changes occur. We can therefore identify the key function of the development of the productive forces in Marx’s theory as the creation of conditions for revolutionary transformations of society. I will call this the Revolutionary Function of the development of the productive forces. The terms in which I have identified this function, however, are too vague to serve as anything more than a starting point. In order to determine which forms of technological development Marx can or must endorse, we need to look more closely at how the development of the productive forces performs its Revolutionary Function. Two elements of the Revolutionary Function can be discerned right away: the idea that the productive
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forces must reach a certain level of development to make possible a new social form, and the idea that at a certain level of development the productive forces undermine the viability of the old form. I call these the enabling function and the undermining function.
The undermining function The idea that productive forces can come into conflict with, and thus undermine, the existing relations of production is central to Marx’s understanding of the historical process. This conflict arises, he argues, when the productive forces develop to a point where they are constrained or fettered by the relations of production. The concept of fettering is invoked in several of Marx’s and Engels’s works, but receives its classic exposition in the Preface: At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.19 Despite frequent use of the concept, however, Marx fails to provide a clear definition of what it is for the relations of production to fetter the productive forces. Several interpretations have been proposed: fettering may involve an absolute stagnation or decline of the productive forces, or a slower rate of development relative to the rate at which they would develop within an alternative set of relations; or it may be the use of existing forces rather than the development of new ones that is fettered, or some combination of development and use, such as what Cohen calls ‘net fettering’: fettering of the used productive capacity that results from development of capacity and rate of use.20 These, and other variants, are set out below. However it is interpreted, the undermining function does not commit Marx to any form of productive development21 under socialism, since he believes that capitalism is the last social form that comes to act as a fetter on that development.22 Neither does it commit him to any further idea of productive development under capitalism if it is assumed, as Marx and Engels did in the Communist Manifesto, that the productive forces have already reached the stage at which they are fettered by capitalist relations of production.23 But, given the continued existence and
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Development fettering
Use fettering
Net fettering
Absolute fettering
Relative fettering
1. Absolute stagnation, that is, zero development of productive capacity 2. Reduced rate of development 3. Regression, that is, negative development None of the existing productive capacity is used!
Productive forces develop more slowly than they would under some alternative relations of production (although not necessarily slower than in the past) A smaller proportion of the existing productive capacity is used than would be used under some alternative relations of production Used productive power at future times is less than under some alternative relations of production
Used productive power (that is, productive capacity multiplied by proportion of productive capacity used) is constant or declining
Figure 12.2 Basic types of fettering
productive growth of capitalism some century and a half later, could contemporary Marxists be committed to the view that fettering has yet to take place and that any productive developments must be supported, whatever their human and ecological consequences, as necessary steps towards the time when capitalism will become a fetter and be ‘burst asunder’? Such a view might be derived from Marx’s comment in the Preface, that ‘No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed’,24 a comment that was perhaps intended to account for the failure of the revolutions of 1848 to initiate the socialist transformation predicted in the Manifesto. I will argue, however, that although there may, among the various accounts of fettering, be some which will render this accusation true (absolute development fettering perhaps), no adequate account of fettering can have this consequence. To do this I make use of two criteria for what is to count as a satisfactory interpretation of fettering. These are the ‘predictability constraint’ and the ‘revolution constraint’, derived by G. A. Cohen from Marx’s account of fettering in the Preface.25 The predictability constraint dictates that a satisfactory conception of fettering must be one whose occurrence in the future can plausibly be anticipated. Cohen argues that absolute development fettering fails to meet this constraint since we
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have no reason to think ‘that, were capitalism, for example, to last forever, then the development of the productive forces would at some point entirely cease’.26 Opinions may vary about the likely trajectory of productive development under capitalism, but if Cohen is correct then the grounds for supposing that fettering has yet to take place are weakened, since it is only if an absolute conception of fettering is assumed that the continued development of the productive forces is proof that they are not fettered. More pertinent to the present discussion is the revolution constraint. This states that ‘it must be plausible to suppose that when relations become fetters they are revolutionized’.27 Cohen argues that relative development fettering fails this test, because the costs and dangers of revolution . . . make it unreasonable to expect a society to undergo revolution just because relations which are better at developing the productive forces are possible, especially when those relations have not already been formed elsewhere and been seen to be better. . . . Would workers overthrow a capitalism which has reduced the length of each computer generation to one year because socialism promises to make it nine months?28 The important point in this, for present purposes, is that fettering occurs when productive development is constrained in such a way as to give people (those who are members of the revolutionary class) reason to replace the fettering relations of production with others which remove that constraint. The question then is: under what sorts of circumstance do people have such a reason? Our earlier discussion showed that technological development may be pursued for a plurality of reasons: increasing the quantity or improving the quality of product, reducing costs, reducing requirements for labour or natural resources, reducing pollution and so on. The next step is to recognize that any reason people have for pursuing technological development may also be a reason for removing constraints upon that development. It follows that in principle fettering may occur when any one of these objectives is hindered by the prevailing relations of production, although in practice each agent’s interest in technological development is likely to involve several of these objectives, and constraints upon one form of development may be offset by development of another element of the bundle. There will, however, be limits to such trade-offs, particularly where peoples’ most basic needs are concerned. Relations of production which allow productive technology to develop,
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but not in the ways that are required in order to mitigate its ecological impact, should therefore be counted as fetters as soon as the detrimental impact of this constricted form of development gives sufficient reason to abolish those relations. The undermining function therefore cannot require that such developments be tolerated as means to bringing about fettering, since a society that has room only for developments of this kind already acts as a fetter.
The enabling function Fettering – whether of the use of the development of the productive forces – cannot be sufficient reason for overthrowing existing relations of production unless there is some alternative that is both better and feasible. In other words, the undermining function of the development of the productive forces is only revolutionary if some such alternative exists. Which alternative relations are viable at any time depends, for Marx, upon the level of development of the productive forces. The effect that the development of the productive forces has in making new relations of production viable is what I call its enabling function. Although Marx does not provide any general summary of the enabling function of productive development comparable with his account of its undermining function in the Preface, it too is integral to the theory of historical materialism. The idea that each set of relations of production becomes viable only when a certain minimum level of productive development is reached helps to explain Marx’s conviction that society must pass through a succession of different relations of production before socialism can emerge.29 Each new set of relations is in its turn made possible by a development of the productive forces which progressively increases the quantity of goods produced beyond what is required to sustain the lives of the producers. As Cohen summarizes it: At the first stage, productive power is too meagre to enable a class of non-producers to live off the labour of producers. The material position is one of absence of surplus, and the corresponding social (or economic) form is a primitive classless society. In the second stage of material development, a surplus appears, of a size sufficient to support an exploiting class, but not large enough to sustain a capitalist accumulation process. The corresponding social form is, accordingly, a pre-capitalist class society . . . At stage 3 the surplus has become generous enough to make capitalism possible.30
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Similar conditions apply for the disappearance of class society. Marx is clearly committed to the proposition that in a socialist society the increased productivity of labour made possible by the advance of technology should be used to reduce the burden of labour,31 yet he is equally clear that an increased level of output must be achieved. In The German Ideology Marx and Engels argue that, for communism to emerge successfully, ‘a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development . . . is an absolutely necessary practical premise, because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced’.32 And similarly, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx writes that the ‘higher phase of communist society’ – characterized by its distribution according to needs – can be entered only ‘after the productive forces have . . . increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly’.33 Since technological development that is aimed at producing more goods has the potential to be ecologically damaging, it will be necessary to look more closely at these preconditions. However, there is nothing in the passages quoted above to imply that Marx is committed to an unceasing rise in output, and his commitment to reducing the burden of labour provides a reason for stabilizing output once it is sufficient for the needs of a Communist society. This would limit the ecological consequences of the development and allow the possibility of these consequences being offset by improvements in the ecological efficiency of productive technology. Indeed, if the reason communism requires productive development is to permit the meeting of human needs then improvements in the ecological efficiency of productive technology may be deemed an essential part of that development, since the ecological consequences that would otherwise ensue pose a threat to those needs.
Explaining productive development I have argued that the revolutionary function of the development of the productive forces may in principle be satisfied by ecologically benign forms of technological development. It is not enough, however, to show such a development would satisfy the revolutionary function if it took place. In order to fulfil the explanatory role attributed to it by Marx it is also necessary that the proffered conception of productive development is one which we have reason to think will occur and will continue (provided capitalist fetters are removed at the appropriate stage) as far
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into the future as is necessary to create the conditions in which socialism can develop and mature.34 The question then arises of whether the mechanism which accounts for the tendency of the productive forces to develop will restrict the range of plausible interpretations of that development. As an example of such a mechanism I will examine Cohen’s influential account of an ‘autonomous tendency for the productive forces to develop’, which might appear to render that development insensitive to changes in circumstances such as the emergence of ecological problems.35 Cohen defines the autonomy of this tendency as ‘its independence of social structure, its rootedness in fundamental material facts of human nature and the human situation’.36 Whether historical materialist explanation requires such autonomy is a controversy which I will not enter into here, except to say that the orthodox vision of an inevitable succession of relations of production, from the earliest human societies through to socialism, appears to depend upon the development of the productive forces being explained, at least in part, by something other than the relations of production within which it takes place. For Cohen, the tendency of the productive forces to develop arises from the conjunction of three facts: one about the human situation and two about human nature. First, humans live in a situation of material scarcity; secondly, they have the capacity to devise more powerful productive forces; and thirdly, they are rational enough to grasp the opportunities provided by this capacity to ameliorate the scarcity under which they labour. Given these facts, Cohen argues, ‘productive power will . . . tend, if not always continuously, then at least sporadically, to expand’.37 The trouble with this is that it seems unlikely that a developmental tendency based on unchanging facts about human nature and the human situation could undergo the required shift from the forms of technological development that have increased productive output to its present levels but at great ecological cost, to the forms which could play a part in reducing those costs. However, what Cohen does not say is that, important though these unchanging facts are, they only partially describe the material conditions under which humans exercise their inventive capacities and make decisions about their productive activities. For Cohen the chief problem faced by humans is having to spend a large proportion of their time producing their needs. Their ingenuity, according to Cohen, enables them to come up with solutions to this problem in the form of technological innovations to increase labour productivity, and their rationality ensures that the best solutions are adopted and retained. However, as was indicated by Jarvie, humans also
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face a range of problems arising out of the concrete social and material circumstances in which they find themselves. Acknowledging that these problems too may motivate the use of our innovative and rational capacities allows us to explain and predict the occurrence of new and varied forms of technological development including, for example, development aimed at reducing the quantity of scarce raw materials that must be consumed in order to meet our needs, or at reducing the deleterious unintended consequences of our need-meeting activity. And, given that the ways in which ecological problems affect people depend on their position within the social structure, this account also makes it plausible to suppose that the extent to which these ecologically oriented forms of technological development feature in the development of the productive forces will depend upon the structure of interests within the prevailing relations of production. This last point suggests that, since we have now included among the motivations for productive development not only the unchanging facts of human existence but also the more specific forms in which humans may experience the effects of material scarcity, the tendency of the productive forces to develop is no longer autonomous of social structure. To investigate this let us consider Cohen’s response to another argument against autonomy, put forward by Levine and Wright.38 They argue that since people’s relation to the productive forces, and therefore their interest in productive development, depends on the social structure within which they live and the position they occupy within it, the tendency for the productive forces to develop cannot be autonomous of social structure but must be explained by a succession of ‘classspecific rationalities’ corresponding to successive social structures. Cohen responds that indeed it is the class-specific rationality in operation at any given time which causes the productive forces to develop, but that the autonomy results from the application of universal human rationality at a higher level. Because of their rationality and because they live in circumstances of scarcity people select just those structures which promote and do not fetter the development of the productive forces, and it follows from this that the existence of a developmental tendency is independent of which structure and which class-specific rationality is in operation.39 So, on Cohen’s account the selection of social structures underlies the tendency of the productive forces to develop and gives that tendency its autonomy. Cohen’s assumption is that the motivation for the selection of structures is always the pursuit of improved labour productivity. I have argued, however, that the selection of structures may be
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motivated by various criteria of technological development, including ecological considerations, and that some elements of this motivation, concern about the ecological effects of production being one of them, are not universal but arise from concrete circumstances.40 Since, for Cohen, it is the selection of social structures that gives the productive forces their tendency to develop, it follows that this tendency may include whatever forms of development feature in the selection of structures. I will leave aside the question of whether the tendency of the productive forces to develop, as we have now described it, is properly called an autonomous one. Suffice it to say that if it is autonomous then this is an autonomy which allows for the development of the productive forces to comprise different forms of technological development under different relations of production, and which therefore does not obviate the need for an ecological analysis of individual social structures. The account presented here is conducive to an ecological Marxism in that it both allows the avoidance or amelioration of ecological problems to be included among the criteria for the development of the productive forces, and at the same time suggests that the channelling of productive development in an ecologically advantageous direction may not be realizable at will but may depend on the selection of appropriate social structures and that the range of technologically possible solutions actually available to a society may be restricted by the choice of structures open to it. However, this same variability of productive development under different social structures takes us back to a reservation registered earlier in the argument. In discussing the enabling function it was acknowledged that although there are reasons for interpreting modestly the expansion of productive output that Marx envisages as necessary for the development of socialism, this is a matter which warrants further investigation. The reasons for a modest interpretation of that expansion have to do with the satisfaction of needs, which Marx sees as its purpose. If our needs include such things as increased leisure time and a healthy environment, then we have reason to limit the expansion of output and to redirect technological development towards these ends. There is, however, at least one persistent element in Marx’s discussion of needs which challenges this argument – his commitment to the growth of needs, which he appears to regard as both desirable and inevitable. This notion itself needs further investigation before definitive conclusions can be drawn, but what it suggests is, firstly, that if there is an ecological problem raised by Marx’s concept of the development of the productive forces it lies not in its general explanatory role within historical materialism but in his conception of socialism,
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secondly, that more research is needed into the ecological implications of what Marx regards as the needs to be satisfied under socialism,41 and thirdly, that an ecological Marxism will have to specify the nature of its socialist objective more fully than Marx himself was willing to do.
Notes 1. This chapter is a revised version of an article in Studies in Marxism 2, 1995, 179–98. An expanded version of the argument will appear in my Ecology and Historical Materialism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000). I am grateful to CUP for permission to use the material here. 2. Ted Benton, ‘Marxism and Natural Limits’, in New Left Review 178, 1989, 51–86. Marx’s account of the production process appears in chapter 7 of the first volume of Capital (C.W., Vol. 35, pp. 187–95). A more detailed critique of Benton’s view can be found in my Ecology and Historical Materialism (note 1), ch. 4. 3. Marx in fact reserves the term ‘raw materials’ for the objects of production that have been processed in previous labour process, contrary to contemporary English usage. 4. Capital, Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976) pp. 285–6 (also in C.W., Vol. 35, p. 190). 5. I am using ‘unintended’ in a broad sense to include consequences of an action which may be foreseen but are not part of the purpose of the activity. The effects of the production process upon the environment may be judged undesirable either because of their direct effects upon humans (e.g. in terms of health or aesthetic or recreational enjoyment of nature), or because they form a feedback loop, reacting upon the natural preconditions (objects or instruments) of the productive process and undermining its sustainability. 6. For example, Reiner Grundmann, Marxism and Ecology (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991) p. 107. 7. ‘Primarily’, since the development of labour power might also include development of the physical strength of workers. 8. C. Freeman, ‘Economics of Research and Development’, in I. Spiegel-Rösing and D. de Solla Price (eds), Science, Technology and Society (London and Beverley Hills, Sage, 1977) p. 225; E. Layton, ‘Conditions of Technological Development’, in ibid. p. 199; cf. C. Mitcham, ‘Philosophy and the History of Technology’, in G.Bugliarello and D. B. Donner (eds), The History and Philosophy of Technology (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1979). 9. G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History (Oxford, Clarendon, 1978) p. 42, argues that knowledge, rather than physical instruments, is the more important part of technology, since instruments can be rebuilt given sufficient knowledge, but without the requisite knowledge the instruments become useless. This thought lies behind Marx’s and Engels’s comment, in The German Ideology (C.W., Vol. 5, p. 67), on how the communications forged by international commerce assure the permanence of productive forces, which, while they remained local, were vulnerable to complete destruction. 10. Naturally given instruments of production are also excluded, insofar as they
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11. 12.
13.
14. 15. 16.
17. 18. 19.
20.
21. 22.
remain undeveloped, but as soon as they undergo development and become artefacts they may be included within the category of technology. Val Routley, ‘On Karl Marx as an Environmental Hero’, in Environmental Ethics 13, 1981, 327–44, p. 242. My purpose here is not to suggest that automation of this kind can eliminate the ecological destruction associated with present levels of motor car use, but simply to illustrate the fact that the automation of technology envisaged by Marx need not be ecologically destructive, as Routley assumes, but may contribute (albeit in a limited way, as I indicate in the following paragraph) to a reduction in its ecological impact. This cautionary note constitutes the rational core of Green objections to ‘technological fixes’ to ecological problems. Limits to the technological amelioration of ecological problems are determined for example by the quantity of materials and energy contained in the product and necessary for the transformation of the raw material into the product. These minima of inputs will also determine minima of waste products, constituted by that part of the fuel or raw material input that does not become incorporated in the product. Technology may, however, enable waste products to be converted into less harmful forms or to be used as resources in some other process. Many Greens do of course recognize that technology has a contribution to make. A useful survey of Green attitudes is contained in C. Spretnak and F. Capra, Green Politics (London, Paladin, 1985) p. 88. However, the widespread use of the terms ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ to designate environmentally damaging and environmentally benign technologies does suggest a preference for traditional or ‘intermediate’ technologies over modern ‘high’ technology. There is certainly a place for the former but in many cases it will be the latter that is more environmentally efficient. See ibid.; also S. Irvine and A. Ponton, A Green Manifesto (London, McDonald, 1988) p. 48. This formulation comes from Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History (note 9), p. 56. For example, Jonathon Porritt, Seeing Green (Oxford, Blackwell, 1984) p. 44. This view can be found, for example, in H. Skolimowski, ‘The Structure of Thinking in Technology’, in C. Mitcham and R. Mackey (eds), Philosophy and Technology (New York and London, Free Press, 1983). A more detailed criticism of Skolimowski appears in my Ecology and Historical Materialism (note 1), ch. 5. I. C. Jarvie, ‘The Social Character of Technological Progress’, in Mitcham and Mackey (eds), Philosophy and Technology (note 16), p. 52. K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1968) p. 181 (also in C.W., Vol. 29, p. 262). Ibid. pp. 181–2 (also in C.W., Vol. 29, p. 263). Earlier works which refer to fettering include The German Ideology (C.W., Vol. 5, p. 82) and the Communist Manifesto (C.W., Vol. 6, p. 489). These are the interpretations of fettering discussed in G. A. Cohen, History, Labour and Freedom (Oxford, Clarendon, 1988) ch. 6. A fuller survey and assessment of the literature on fettering can be found in my Ecology and Historical Materialism (note 1), s. 5.4.1. I use the term ‘productive development’ as shorthand for the development of the productive forces. This is a belief which needs some defence, given the stagnation and
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23. 24. 25. 26.
27. 28. 29.
30.
31.
32. 33. 34. 35.
36.
subsequent collapse of socialist economies in the late 1980s and early ’90s, but one which Marxists cannot easily dispense with, since it is hard, even on grounds of distributive justice, to defend a productively inefficient system. C.W., Vol. 6, p. 489. Marx and Engels, Selected Works (note 18), p. 182 (C.W., Vol. 29, p. 263). Cohen, History, Labour and Freedom (note 20), pp. 109–10. Ibid. p. 110. Cohen also doubts whether we have reason to think ‘that a persisting capitalism would, in time, display a deceleration in the rate of development of the productive forces’. Ibid. Ibid. p. 111. This is not the only means Marx has at his disposal to explain the necessity of stage by stage social development, since he could also appeal to the idea that each set of relations can only emerge from a particular predecessor, in which some class has the motivation and ability to bring it about. However, it should be apparent from what follows that the successive ‘enabling’ of relations of production by the development of the productive forces forms at least part of Marx’s explanation of their sequential emergence. Cohen, History, Labour and Freedom (note 20), pp. 155–6. The dependence of the emergence of exploitative societies on the growth of production is noted by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (C.W., Vol. 26, p. 261). The accumulative character of capitalism is discussed in Capital, Vol. 1 (C.W., Vol. 35), Part 7. See, for example, Capital, Vol. 1 (C.W., Vol. 35), ch. 10, especially s. 1 on ‘The Limits of the Working Day’, and ch. 15, especially s. 3(b) on ‘The Prolongation of the Working Day’. The German Ideology (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1970) p. 56 (also in C.W., Vol. 5, pp. 48–9). Marx and Engels, Selected Works (note 18), p. 320 (also in C.W., Vol. 24, pp. 86–7). This requirement parallels the ‘predictability constraint’ that Cohen places upon the interpretation of fettering. Cohen’s explanation of the development of the productive forces is not, of course, the only one on offer. I have chosen to investigate his account for two main reasons. Firstly, Cohen’s account of the tendency of the productive forces to develop seems to me to be a plausible one, once the amendments suggested below have been incorporated. Secondly, the initial appearance that Cohen’s account has, of being insensitive to the circumstances in which technological development takes place, means that it raises the problem that I want to consider in starker form than other, more ‘dialectical’ interpretations which give greater emphasis to the role of production relations. What my argument below indicates, however, is (i) that Cohen’s account gives a more significant role to production relations than his critics sometimes realize (as shown by Cohen’s reply to Levine and Wright); and (ii) that when the suggested amendments, motivated by Cohen’s own argument, are incorporated, this yields an account of productive development which has the potential to be sensitive to a wider range of material circumstances than Cohen realizes, including the emergence and development of ecological problems. Cohen, History, Labour and Freedom (note 20), p. 84.
254 Jonathan Hughes 37. Ibid. p. 86. 38. A. Levine and E. O. Wright, ‘Rationality and Class Struggle’, New Left Review 123, 1980, 47–68. 39. Cohen, History, Labour and Freedom (note 20), pp. 89–90, expresses this by saying that although there is an autonomous tendency for the productive forces to develop (since the existence of the tendency exists independently of which social structure obtains), there is not a tendency for the forces to develop autonomously (since productive forces only develop in the context of suitable relations of production). An alternative way of expressing this would be to say that there is a transcendental tendency for the productive forces to develop. This terminology expresses the idea that although social structure is involved causally in the development of the productive forces, the tendency is universal in virtue of the fact that it is a condition for the existence of any structure that it produces such a tendency. 40. It could be argued that ecological problems have the same source in the universal condition of material scarcity as the need to spend large amounts of time working, but so far as the selection of social structures is concerned the point is that whereas (if Cohen is to be believed) this scarcity always manifests itself in the latter way, it is only manifest in ecological problems when the productive forces become powerful enough and the population large enough to exhaust resources, cause serious pollution, etc. 41. I address the ecological implications of Marx’s theory of need in Ecology and Historical Materialism (note 1), ch. 6.
Part 4 Marxism and Post-Marxism
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13 Post-Marxism: Radical Political Theory and Practice Beyond Marxism? Paul Reynolds
What is Post-Marxism and how does its critique of Marxist theory and politics stand up to scrutiny? To what extent does it offer a radical theory and practice beyond Marxism for the twenty-first century? Behind these straightforward questions lies an extensive and diverse literature that departs from, challenges or rejects the contribution of Marxism to the idea of radical and emancipatory politics. Much of this literature signposts social, political, cultural and economic change that moves the world far from Marx’s experience and the character of Marxism as a critique of capitalist modernity. It challenges those who have followed Marx to prove the continued validity and applicability of Marxist concepts, ideas and frameworks of analysis.1 Some of the literature focuses on social divisions (such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity) or political concerns (ecology) that Marx said little about or left, by inference, subordinate to and determined by class struggle.2 Some attacks the methodological and epistemological basis of Marx’s analyses – the building blocks of Marxist theory and politics – and claim to identify severe limits to the insights Marxism offers.3 Some castigates Marxism as a fundamentally flawed project that gave rise to tyrannical Communist regimes when adopted as a political blueprint.4 This discussion will focus in this brief space on the doyennes of post-Marxism, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who draw from post-structuralist and postmodernist theory to develop their radical materialism, redefining emancipatory politics within the idea of radical democracy. It does not preclude or exclude, however, other variants of thought that identify themselves as post-Marxist.5 The tasks of identifying the key features of post-Marxism and assessing its theoretical and political value as an alternate radicalism are 257
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complex and deceptive. Post-Marxism brings together diffuse and abstruse discourses drawn from a range of fields – linguistics and semiotics, philosophy, literature, cultural studies and the social sciences. Indeed, the label appears in such diverse contexts that it obscures the heterogeneity of the arguments it subsumes. It is perhaps better understood as a theatre of struggle or theoretical moment within which a number of different critical challenges simultaneously besiege Marxist theory and politics with a common claim of better explaining social change. Alternately, if a focus is put upon its principal interlocutors, it can be understood rather simply. It is a product of a particular set of intellectual and political contexts: the collapse of communism; the process of globalization; the respective accomplishments of social democracy and neo-liberal conservatism; and the fragmentation, alienation and changed conditions of the intersection of the intelligentsia with political action in the late twentieth century. Its characteristics are pessimism, self-absorption, surrender, and a ‘politics of mind’ that can be traced back to Hegelian thought. This critical appraisal explores the problems, contradictions and spurious ill-informed constructions of post-Marxism while acknowledging the challenge raised by some of the epistemological, theoretical and political questions raised within the post-Marxist oeuvre. What is important, and arguably dialectical, in both Marxist and post-Marxist writings, is to ‘sort the wheat from the chaff’, dignify what is useful with critical analysis and consign the rest to the dustbin.
Post-Marxism or identifying the emperor’s clothes Post-Marxism is a terminologically inexact umbrella for a range of positions that claim to challenge, reinterpret or reject key features of Marxist thinking. Sim, taking a lead from Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, distinguishes two forms of post-Marxism: To be post-Marxist is to have turned one’s back on the principles of Marxism (the case of Jean-Francois Lyotard or Jean Baudrillard . . .); whereas to be post-Marxist is, in the style of Laclau and Mouffe, to attempt to graft recent theoretical developments in poststructuralism, deconstruction, post-modernism and feminism, such that Marxism can be made relevant to a new cultural climate . . . One could sum up post-Marxism as a series of hostile and/or revisionary
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responses from classical Marxism . . . by figures who at one time . . . would have considered themselves as Marxists, or whose thought processes had been significantly shaped by the classical Marxist tradition.6 This simplification distinguishes ‘anti-Marxists’ who reject Marxism, and those who transgress its fundamental categories in the belief that such transgression moves forward the spirit of Marxist enterprise – a radical project of human emancipation. It also signposts a significant criticism of post-Marxism made by Geras as to what ‘classical Marxism’ post-Marxism asserts it is ‘beyond’.7 Geras decries the work of Laclau and Mouffe as presenting ‘. . . an impoverishing caricature of the Marxist tradition . . . the authors caricature Marxism by their habitual procedure of confronting it with spurious, absurdly rigid antitheses . . . The account they render of some key Marxist thinkers is a travesty of the tradition, reducing and devaluing it and distorting many of its ideas’.8 Post-Marxists make three very questionable assumptions about Marx’s and Marxists’ writings. First, they present central tenets such as the materialist conception of history and dialectical methodology as a ‘science of society’ as rigid, overdetermining and reductionist. In this, the prevailing focus of post-Marxists on discursivity in the production of social critique is curiously absent from their analysis. They do not show sensitivity to the language, meaning and ontology of science in the context of nineteenth-century industrial capitalist modernity, driven by enlightenment values and preoccupied with the power of science and its truth.9 Equally, they are not sensitive to the political context of building workers’ organization around, for example, the Communist League, which led Marx and Engels to employ representations of bald class dichotomies and inexorable pathways to classless society, as in the Communist Manifesto. Further, they seem to have a particular reading of Marx’s later, incomplete political economy and the Russian and German traditions that built upon it, rather than his correspondence, journalism and earlier, more philosophical writings. Second, they read theoretical determinations and reductive analyses in Marxist analyses as always rigid, dogmatic and unsustainable, again curious for an epistemological position that rejects ‘grand narrative’ assertions of ‘truth’. They therefore do not dig beneath the surface of the determinations argued,10 and therefore miss the considerable contingency and contradictions within Marxist analyses of the nature of
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change in capitalist and class societies, for example debates around relative autonomy and the state.11 Finally, Marxism has not developed as a homogenous and singular critique of modern society. The development of Marxist theory and politics in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been characterized by debates and conflicts over the boundaries to and best interpretation of Marx’s work. Marx’s work is sufficiently incomplete, fissured and contradictory to lend itself to such disputes, particularly as, contrary to Marx’s own wishes, interpretation of his work became reified and synonymous with holding the high ground in the socialist analysis of capitalism. Hence it is possible to look at such diverse traditions as critical theory, Trotskyist analyses, Leninist democratic centralism and the Eurocommunist reading of Gramsci’s writings and see departures from Marx and continuities with Marx. The question of when a particular theoretical exposition moves from a balance of continuities with Marx’s core categories and analyses to divergences beyond them has been a prevalent feature of Marxists’, rather than post-Marxists’, critiques of ‘Marxist’ works. Post-Marxism’s stretching and testing Marxist thought is thus neither new nor novel, but distinguishes itself by the intent of those who embrace the label of post-Marxism to draw a line between Marxist theory and contemporary radical politics. A consequence is the unresolved contradictions of post-Marxists paying homage to their Marxist roots (Laclau and Mouffe to Gramsci, post-structuralists to contributions from the critical theory of Horkenheimer, Adorno and Marcuse) while berating ‘Marxism’ as a body of theory and politics.12 Their selective and singular reading of Marx’s writings and the Marxist traditions of Lenin, Luxemburg and so on creates a misleading and ambiguous ‘mannequin’ of Marxism, against which they defend the spirit of emancipatory politics. This ambiguity and diversity of origin and point of departure from Marxism only makes post-Marxism more slippery a construct to define. For the purpose of identifying the ‘subject’ of study, however, postMarxism is a heterogeneous diffusion of radical pluralist, democratic and identity politics, politics of social divisions other than class and post-structuralist and post-modern rejections of grand theory and social schema. What it has in common is a habitual rejection of one or more principal characteristic of Marxist theory: the materialist conception of history; dialectics as social dynamic and method; class and the mode of production as principal, organizing features of human societies; capitalism and class politics as grand narratives in the development of modern societies; and the notion of a single scientific analysis which yielded insights beyond subjective position.13
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Post-Marxism – principal strands in context Post-Marxism arises from political and cultural change in the 1960s, but this in turn finds its context in the postwar social democratic settlement.14 Social democracy presented a feasible alternative between capitalism and socialism for 25 years after the Second World War. It saw democratic representation, self-determination, state intervention and public responsibility (in welfare and economy) and pluralist politics and social integration as central to the cultural and social values of Western societies. It developed in the context of relatively rapid economic growth and technological advance, tied to military and ‘cold war’ expenditure. It gave rise to two contradictions; a growing conflict between the expansion of public responsibility and the rate of return for private profit (‘the economic contradictions of democracy’) and the extension of social and cultural forms of pluralism that critiqued the social values of social democracy.15 The latter, driven by developments in identity and subculture forming consumption, culminated in ‘counter-culture’ challenges to dominant values and political challenges to prevailing ideologies and political orthodoxies and institutions in the late 1960s. This was particularly focused on the Vietnam War, militarism, imperialism and rampant capitalism in the West, and different forms of social prejudice, discrimination and oppression. The climax to these challenges came in 1968, with mass student and worker demonstrations across the principal industrial nations in the West, and the ‘Prague Spring’, the short-term liberalization of Czechoslovakian communism (that ended with a Soviet invasion) in the East.16 The failure to achieve social and political transformation at this radical moment was a watershed for any prevailing optimism for social change by socialist strategy from below or benign reform sponsored by labour interests in representative democracies. A decade of global economic and political crisis and the resurgence of the ‘right’ in Western nation-states followed in the 1970s. The experience of extensive conservative dominance (Thatcher, Reagan, Kohl) or socialist reversion to conservative policies (Mitterand) compounded the seeming ‘crisis of Marxism’ in the 1980s, while seeming to close the door on reformism. The conservative sponsorship of economic liberalism and market forces, authoritarian leadership in delegitimating working class representation and organized power, and the raising of a conservative agenda to global political and economic structures in the 1980s and 1990s gave rise to a triumphal liberal democratic rhetoric.17 Against these developments in the West, ‘actually existing’ Soviet or
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Maoist communism fell into decline. Western Marxists became critical and detached from communism after Khruschev’s exposure of the excesses of Stalinism and subsequent Soviet military interventions against dissidence in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). Their condemnations of the failings of communism are wide-ranging, from ‘workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations, to ‘state capitalism’.18 Nevertheless, the collapse of Soviet communism, alongside the impoverishment of Cuba and the incursion of market forces and values in China, had an impact on Marxist scholarship and politics. Bauman noted that the political significance of the fall of communism was its representation of defeat for the modernist project of creating a rational social (or socialist) order.19 This defeat came at the same time as a process of privatization of dissent redefined the terms of resistance to capitalist markets in the West away from political, state and public domains and towards individual, civil, community, cultural and private domains. This reflection is supported by a number of developments in the 1980s and 1990s. These include the marketization of higher education, the development and professionalization of a cultural literati serving the media for middle class audiences, and the political retreat from working class politics among parties and organizations (for example trade unions) seeking the electorally satisfying ‘mainstream’ of political discourse, all of which stifled opposition. Such factors undoubtedly influenced the development of a post-Marxist left, disillusioned with the prospects of the ‘project’ of class politics, open to the more popular and emergent voices of identity and ecological politics and engaging in a nascent post-materialist, postmodern analysis of contemporary politics. Geras20 identified context as critical to understanding the development of post-Marxism as a prelude to criticizing Laclau and Mouffe21 and is somewhat unjustly criticized for it in the response.22 While context does not determine thought, any materialist analysis of theorizing about society acknowledges that context impacts upon thinking and discourse. It does not necessarily imply that someone has ‘sold out’ or conspiratorially sought to turn against former allies. It asserts that people’s actions and utterances are conditioned by their material conditions of existence and historic conjuncture, unless they can align themselves to a political or ideological (or counter-hegemonic) project of resistance. Further, class interests under capitalism will seek to subvert and nullify that project. This is precisely why context is such an important element of decoding theoretical or political projects, and particularly important in understanding the conditions that gave rise to
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post-Marxist rejections of and alternatives to Marxist theory and politics.
The post-Marxist flag-bearers: Laclau and Mouffe The work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe has been central to the development of a post-Marxist theoretical position and politics, if only because they explicitly proclaim themselves post-Marxist.23 They associate Marxism with a totalizing politics and essentialist, reductionist theory that cannot escape the vagaries of the degeneration of Soviet communism in practice and has exhausted its radical potential. Taking from post-structuralism, theirs is a ‘deconstructive impulse’, in which they seek to liberate plural, diverse and heterogeneous social identities from a class hegemony, in order to awaken a radical and participative democracy as the basis for emancipation and transformation beyond the constraints of the Marxist tradition. This call for emancipation beyond class is their solution to what they see as a stultifying contradiction in Marx’s writings. Objective and immutable laws of history prefigure the resolution of class antagonism through the unfolding of the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, while the contingent engagement of class forces in struggle seems a necessary precondition of elevating revolutionary consciousness and seizing power. To Laclau and Mouffe, the former determines the latter and denies implied subjectivity or agency to class forces. A consequence is that radical politics are always tied to a debilitating pattern of material (crudely reduced to economic) constraints that have ontological precedence in Marxist analysis. Their solution is to deny the determination of ‘objective and immutable laws’, and theorize radicalism around identities as self-creating subjectivities. Identities become the basis for antagonistic social relations, which arise from constraints to the realization of identities in societies constructed by oppressive discourses. Identity forms the boundaries that are drawn between different social agents, but also compose an ‘open’ model of society. Power, oppression and resistance are constructed not from essential and privileged structural locations but the continuing remaking of contingent, perhaps interdependent but not determinant hegemonic and counterhegemonic projects. Radical politics becomes a hegemonic ‘chess game’ where identity formations seek to work through the antagonisms that constrain their emancipation. This offers a politics that speaks to the concerns of the impoverished, prejudiced against and principled,
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offering support to feminist, anti-racist, ecological, sexual, disability and other forms of ‘new social movement’ and identity politics. Conveniently, class identity, shorn of any assertions of objective conditions of material existence and so of primary analytical value as a category, becomes a marginalized, fragmented and contradictory identity. What is needed is an organizing principal, in place of class, to facilitate emancipation and realization, and this principle is radical democracy – a concept reflecting a commitment to access, engagement, participation and subscription by plural, diverse and different identities to an all-inclusive democratic politics which emphasizes egalitarianism and social justice. Radical democracy provides both a unifying principle, a framework for convergence of divergences around a particular organizing politics, and a model of politics that is congruent with the description of proliferating, plural and diverse movement politics at the end of the twentieth century. Because Laclau and Mouffe’s underlying epistemological project is that of deconstruction from grand class narratives, their construction of categories of identity and radical democracy is as discursive subjects. This concentration on discourse refocuses analysis from holistic social analyses to relational analyses between different identities, within different and particular social, subsystem and subcultural contexts, institutions and processes. Discursive analysis focuses on language and meanings, and so shifts the centre of power in society to the axis of power and knowledge, rather than power and production.24 Identities are thus socially constituted, with specific subjective characteristics and self-awareness, within particular social contexts. The meanings by which they constitute themselves, and their relations with other identities, are constantly shifting, and the boundaries between identities constantly reforming. This very flux ensures that a fixed hierarchy of identities can never be stable, that emancipation is not a masquerade for the reordering of hierarchies of oppression, and underlines the need for radical democracy to facilitate this remaking. Further, the meaning of radical democracy is itself constructed discursively, constantly in flux, remade and disputed by the its constituents. There is, therefore, no stable and fixed formation of constraint to democratic politics through rigidities in its institutions and processes, and emancipation can only be achieved if all identities enjoy the same conditions of freedom and participation in ‘remaking’ democracy. For Laclau and Mouffe, radical democracy is post-Marxist in so far as it arises from Gramscian Marxism and its impact on the development of cultural studies. To, others for example Sim,25 it is little more than
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nostalgia, with radical democracy showing a far greater departure from Marxism than legacy within it. Whichever, these ideas have influenced the development of social movement theory.26 Its core commitment to democracy as a unifying concept which permits space for plurality and diversity is a feature of British post-Marxist work. Its imprint can also be seen in the departure from Marxist analyses of social and political theorists such as Giddens and Hirst.27 They reflect the insights of poststructuralist and postmodern theory in rejecting essentialism, reductionism, determinism and functionalism in its construction of a radical politics for the twenty-first century. At the same time, there is a rejection of simple relativism through recognition of postmodern insights into the nature of power-knowledge relations arising from distinct institutional, historical and social configurations and conjunctures. Laclau and Mouffe’s ideas fall into the broader remit of poststructuralist and postmodern thought. Such thinking denies ‘grand’ narratives and social change and instead favours deconstructive and discursive methodologies in examining social phenomena. It thus rejects essential or determining preconditions to social theory, any politics of ‘truth’ and any elaboration of objective relations as causal and determinant in relation to ‘subjective’ narratives.28 This methodological base provides for a plural, diverse and contingent politics of identities (and transgressions beyond identity categories), recognizing the specificity of identity, value positions and beliefs as defining and dignifying features of the new politics of subverting hierarchical power and rejecting oppression and exploitation. Politics is constituted in the realms of culture, consumption and environment rather than formal political discourse. Post-structuralism originated partly within the general intellectual climate which gave rise to post-Marxism, but also in French philosophical and political debates in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. The intellectual rivalries between those sympathetic to (Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Althusser) and antipathetic to (Derrida, Lyotard, arguably Foucault) Marx were framed in the critical engagements within French ‘academe’, spilling over into Parisian cultural life.29 Post-structuralists were drawn to the possibilities offered by Wittgenstein and Heidegger, growing disillusioned with structuralism (Levi Strauss) and its Marxist appropriation by Althusser, and with Sartre’s attempts at marrying existentialist humanism and Marxism. Miller, for example, traces the development of Foucault’s intellectual enterprise through critical engagements with Sartre, Husserl and French Marxism quite explicitly within the context of a thriving and public competition between French intellectuals for
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popularity and admiration.30 This intellectual context was reinforced by political debates over the role of the French Communist Party in its defence of the Soviet Union, limited support for workers’ action in 1968 and engagement with parliamentary politics. Post-structuralist and postmodern interventions against Marxism are diverse in their approach. Lyotard, for example, attacks what he regards as an implicit, one-dimensional rationalism in Marx’s political economy, the contradictions between Marx’s ‘irrationality’ in the production and dissemination of his work and the rationality of his theorizing, and the foundational nature of Marxist theory.31 These are grounds for a departure from Marxist to post-Marxist opportunities. Alternatively, Derrida reappraises the legacy of Marx’s work and questions the way Marx has been read since his death, not least by Marxists, while claiming Marx’s legacy as too enduring – a ‘spectre’ over contemporary political thought – to be exorcised and forgotten in theorizing society.32 For Derrida, Marxism provides lineages to different cultural locations of struggle that are not reducible to a single determination, presenting a Marx unfamiliar in comparison with the Marx of Lyotard or Lenin. The differences between Marxism and post-structuralism are ‘first order’ methodological and epistemological concerns, and imply a fundamental incommensurability, yet, contemplating Derrida, it does not warrant the often blanket misrepresentation of post-structuralist thinkers as ‘anti-Marxist’. Best and Kellner provide a useful clarifying discussion of the trajectories of post-structuralist and postmodern scholarship, and post-Marxism within it, when they observe . . . post-modern theory is polarised around two conflicting wings. Baudrillard, Kroker, and others espouse an extreme postmodernism that repudiates modern theory and politics whilst heralding a postmodern rupture in history. Laclau, Mouffe, Jameson, Fraser and Nicholson and other feminists, by contrast, adopt postmodern positions while stressing continuities between the present age and modernity. For these dialectical thinkers, the discourse of the postmodern is a borderline discourse between the modern and the postmodern that allows a creative restructuring of modern theory and politics. In part, these two wings can be seen as different responses to the failure of radical politics in the 1960s. Some theorists (Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Laclau and Mouffe, and many feminists) worked to develop new forms of radical politics; others returned to
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an old liberal politics refurbished with new labels (Lyotard); while still others (Baudrillard) eventually gave up on politics altogether and declared the end of society, politics, the masses and history.33 The post-Marxist received wisdom is that Marxism is irretrievably flawed: that its spirit as an emancipatory project for modern times is admirable, but that its methodology, theory and politics are undermined by flawed claims of scientific method, theoretical overdetermination and the failure of Communist politics in practice. As Sim concludes: Perhaps it is time to admit that Marxism is beyond revision . . . and that all that remains is a nostalgia for the ideal it appeared to be offering . . . Post-Marxism marks not a new beginning nor a way out of a theoretical cul-de-sac, but a recognition of defeat . . . It is part of the tragedy of the Marxist tradition (shining ideals, generally dreadful realization of them) . . .34
Towards a critique of post-Marxism The starting point of a decoding of post-Marxism is to simply rehearse the importance of context in understanding departures from Marxism, as outlined above. The response to this can range from Geras’s recognition of the human limitations to social and political thought to the more critical rebuttals of post-Marxists as flawed or disingenuous in their thinking. Sivanandan puts it: A sort of bazaar socialism, bizarre socialism, a hedonistic socialism: an eat, drink and be merry socialism because tomorrow we can eat, drink and be merry again . . . a socialism of disillusioned Marxist intellectuals who waited around too long for the revolution – a socialism that holds up everything that is ephemeral and evanescent and passing as vital and worthwhile, everything that melts into air as solid . . .35 Callinicos reflects this critique in a broader rejection of postmodernism when he identifies the ‘political odyssey of the 1968 generation’ and in his analysis that: The discourse of postmodernism is best seen as the product of a socially mobile intelligentsia in a climate dominated by the retreat
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of the western labour movement and the ‘overconsumptionist’ dynamic of capitalism in the Reagan-Thatcher era. From this perspective, the term ‘postmodern’ would seem . . . [the] means [by] which this intelligentsia has sought to articulate its political disillusionment and its aspiration to a consumption-oriented lifestyle . . . talk about postmodernism turns out to be less about the world than the expression of a particular generation’s sense of an ending.36 This criticism, aimed at postmodernists, is equally applicable to postMarxists, except that the latter might be seen to be expressing their pessimism, frustration and false optimism in a radical engagement with a triumphalist liberal democracy.37 Cloud develops this analysis in recognizing the connections between the radical democrat project and ‘New Age’ politics that emerged from the 1960s, and characterizing postMarxism as a therapeutic ‘socialism’ of the mind’.38 Undoubtedly the need to engage with the electoral success of liberal democratic politics in the 1980s was a key motivation for some postMarxists. Sivanandan’s critique of Hall and Jacques in part acknowledges that and Frankel, looking at American and English post-Marxist scholarship through the journals Telos and Economy and Society, engages with these motivations.39 Frankel’s analysis criticizes a crude engagement with populism at the expense of a deeper analysis of the political and economic strategies and interests that created it, and a failure to account for the intrinsic conservatism of liberal democratic populism. Laclau and Mouffe point to this problem themselves when they remark: ‘The task of the Left therefore cannot be to renounce liberal democratic ideology, but, on the contrary, to deepen and expand it in the direction of a radical and plural democracy’ (their italics).40 Again, with clarity, Mouffe asserts: . . . In stressing the centrality of the idea of pluralism for modern democracy, I recognize the latter’s debt to the liberal tradition . . . in order to develop fully the potentialities of the liberal ideals of individual freedom and personal autonomy, we need to disassociate them from the other discourses to which they have been articulated and to rescue political liberalism from its association with economic liberalism. . . . in order to radicalize the idea of pluralism, so as to make it a vehicle for the deepening of the democratic revolution, we have to break with rationalism, individualism and universalism.41
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Their problem is that their debt to liberalism is all too evident in the radical democratic project. They focus on agency, autonomy and contingency at the expense of structure and constraint. They focus on choices and possibilities without considering the extent to which power structures and processes channel and contain choice. More, their characterization of these concepts is self-referential – a closed language game of concepts which only have meaning if the pre-givens of poststructuralist and radical democrat thinking are accepted. And beneath this language game, if the pre-givens of post-structuralism are discarded? A thriving liberal pluralism with the intelligentsia neatly tucked back into the contradictory class location of ‘structured and contained dissent’? The post-structuralist pre-givens that constitute this discursive game are spuriously applied. Mindful of anti-foundationalism, they replace a class ‘universal’ with a conceptual universal – democracy. They deny rationalism but imbue radical democracy with a teleological logic reliant on a rationalist notion of people rising above interests and identities within the context of constructing a hegemonic politics of democracy. Yet nowhere is it clear how this politics will proceed to dismantle the state and polity that structures the present ensemble of institutions and orthodoxies that stand against it. Ironically, given the subject and focus of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe run into real trouble on three fronts. First, their transformation of the concept of hegemony from a materialist to a post-structuralist discursive context deprives the concept of its explanatory and mobilizing power. Hegemony moves from having a very specific meaning, grounded in the material conflicts of class forces within particular political terrains at particular historical conjunctures, to become a metaphor for balances of power and powerlessness in societies characterized by diversity. By doing so they render themselves unable to produce a strategic analysis of the social forces which construct institutions and orthodoxies and defend entrenched political positions, requiring in turn counter-hegemonic strategies of resistance. They cannot explain, other than by subscription to the process of democracy, how solidarity is built, how contingent alliances are formed and strategic struggles are selected in particular sequences and using particular political tactics. Instead, hegemony becomes a subject of discourses, contained in cultural practices and identity politics, without a clear critique of structural power, ideological power and the power of the state as a mechanism that mediates with identity groups and incorporates them into the political and policy processes of the polity. Hegemony empties
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as a concept, losing both its specificity and its sense of providing an organizing framework in which to focus and develop specific strategies for resistance. All that remains is the simple articulation of identity and self-emancipation through an abstractive notion of democracy. Second, the failure of this discursive construction of hegemony lays bare a contradiction in the account Laclau and Mouffe give of social relations. They distinguish between ‘relations of subordination’ and ‘relations of oppression’ when discussing the subjection of a nonrealized identity to the interests and decisions of an other, and its transformation into an antagonistic relationship. The problem here is that they have no theory of power or ideology outside of discursive practice by which to either explain how this transformation takes place or how this transformation is thwarted. Why does one become the other? Unless there is a teleological basis to emancipation such shifts and exercises of power are contingent, without ownership, without strategy and without explanations for the continuation and adaptation of discourses of oppression to maintain domination. Finally, with no conception of power beyond the discursive, and so no ideology critique, they have no means of explaining the means by which discursive antagonisms are resolved in the context of ensembles of institutions and orthodoxies that constitute a political space – the state and polity. Discursive practice can constitute political relationships and mediation between political identities, and discourse analysis can explicate different degrees of discursive power, but they cannot theorize emancipatory transformation. How does radical democracy emerge from liberal democratic states? How does it address the conservative entrenched interests and discourses that populate state, bureaucracy and judiciary? Is discourse powerful enough, of itself, to change social relations? Surely there need to be extra-discursive variables to allow for changing balances of discursive power, or indeed to subvert discursive power from the state and entrenched interests. The focus on identities also raises several questions about the postMarxist project. It ignores any possibility that whilst postmodern intellectual enquiry requires no pre-given characterizing or determining features, communities and societies might require some shared characteristics in counterbalance to plurality and diversity. Is an abstract concept of process enough to encourage solidarity and community? Remember, the concept itself is discursive and subject to repeated renegotiation (and undoubtedly reinterpellation). Is there a limit to diversity and plurality in a society? Forgacs identified radical denocrats pluralist politics as undermining the strategic movement towards its apparently
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socialist aspirations.42 Is it no more than idealism to expect that constraint will have to be exercised over some movement’s interests, if only by prioritization of radical changes? Radical democrats say little about the problems of having to exclude anti-democratic identities or account for self-created identities for which democracy is a vehicle for power and not a principal of governance. As Aronowitz observed, in proving their commitment to pluralism they fail to distinguish a moral authority and authoritarian politics – or indeed a hegemonic project centred on the moral authority of a social analysis arising from social relations.43 Their model of politics fragments and individuates radical struggles and provides as a hegemonic dynamic for change a rather teleological notion of democracy, both as a vehicle for change and the central conceptual explanandum of how this radicalized society will look. This hegemonic model does not distinguish effectively between different struggles that claim to be for democracy – leaving open the possibility that democracy, as a discursive concept, is open to reinterpretation and becomes the object of struggles to own its definition. To put it more simply, identifying democracy as discursive does not ultimately avoid the problem that part of hegemonic strategy is the ideological seizure of the ‘high’ conceptual ‘ground’ of democracy. How do we then distinguish and value the different movements and their politics? The idea of a discursive and dynamic concept lying at the centre of political strategy is attractive in that it avoids conflicts between ‘radicals’ but unspecific in the boundaries it chooses not to define. It sidesteps demarcation between democratic and undemocratic, between movements we should sympathize with and not sympathize with, between effective and marginal disputes over strategy. By rejecting a material context to social processes – and so an analysis of ideology – for a discursive, linguistically constructed radicalism, they fall into the trap of a language game that has no reference other than itself. The test of their assertions of a discursive radical democracy is that it confronts, explains and provides strategic guidance in respect of specific political conditions and developments. Their rejection of universals – particularly a materialist universal – is a rejection of any means by which discourse can be integrated into the making of political strategy. Best and Kellner summarize the consequences of this position through the insights of Anderson, Geras and Mouzelis in painting a picture of the indeterminancy and randomness of this political world.44 Radical democrats are without the tools to make qualitative distinctions as to what radical struggles might be more or less important at any strategic moment or in deconstructing the nature of oppression, power
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and inequality within a particular society. They are without the conceptual tools to valorize particular political struggles and assess their differential meanings, importance and values, and so ascribe some sense of order within the domain of political struggles. Form triumphs over substance, doing over being, process over meaning. Ironically, a politics that supposedly privileges diversity cannot provide the means of evaluating and so appreciating it, or marking the ebb and flow of its relations with other identities, the patterns of oppressive discourse that it is subject to, and prevalent ensembles of political institutions and orthodoxies. This is the essence of its idealism and its relativism. It is workable if we presume such absence of conflict in society that radical democracy becomes the endpoint of a teleological process, or if we interpret antagonism not as endemic conflict but as the performance of competition, an altogether more liberal position. This sleight of hand teleology, hidden by discourse but the veritable ‘ghost at the feast’, might be seen as a step back towards Hegel, rather than a step forward towards a new radicalism. It is also opportunistic in its appeal for democracy to unify diverse movements, in apparent contradiction to its critique of Marxism. Democracy becomes as much a panacea as class might in a vulgar Marxist analysis. At the same time, radical democracy, curiously, ignores the strong association of Marxism and democracy, represented in the arguments of Ellen Meiksins Wood.45 Wood asserts the centrality of democracy within the Marxist tradition, and the necessity of democracy to be reconciled with questions of economy as well as polity ‘. . . democracy needs to be reconceived not simply as a political category but as an economic one. What I mean is not simply ‘economic democracy’ as a greater equality of distribution. I have in mind democracy as an economic regulator, the driving mechanism of the economy’.46 The Marxist and non-Marxist critique of the excesses of discursivity and post-structuralist theory is well developed, both in critical rejection and in absorbing critical insights. Dews has pointed to the fetishization of the logic of deconstruction beyond a critical methodological test to theory construction and towards a demolition of all theoretical positions for their attempt to say something meaningful.47 Habermas rejects the easy assumption of the end of the Enlightenment Project of modernity and argues that the challenges to late modernity can be met within, rather than without, the philosophical discourses of modernity.48 McLennan’s beautifully crafted rebuttal of the ‘sins of modernist
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theorizing’ argues that foundational assertions, for all their reductionism or determinism, are not intrinsically bad things – they are, after all, at the back of any attempts to make sense of society by elaborating ‘first principles’.49 This is where the Marxist rebuttal of post-Marxism moves from acknowledging the methodological value of post-structuralist cautions to rejecting the ‘incredulity of grand narratives’ offered in poststructuralist thinking. Callinicos’s critique, in this vein, provides an extensive rebuttal of the post-structuralist and postmodernist attacks on Marxism.50 He identifies the central weakness of post-structural and postmodern writings as, qua Geras, a tendency towards a caricatured representation of modernity that allows its easy rejection, and a failure to provide an adequate philosophical or political basis to their critique of society ‘. . . their denial of any objectivity to discourse, their inability to ground the resistance to power which they claim to articulate, and their denial of any coherence or initiative to the human subject’.51
Post-Marxism, Marxism and radical politics in the twenty-first century Whatever the intentions, motivations or indeed commitments to the renewal of a radical politics in a ‘cold climate’, it is hard to argue with Miliband: Each in its own way . . . Post-Marxism, post-modernism, poststructuralism and related currents of thought has served, whatever the intentions of its protagonists, to strengthen the recoil from general notions of human emancipation, particularly Marxism. Any such ‘meta-saga’, in the contemptuous formulation of one of the prophets of post-modernism, Jean-Francois Lyotard, is viewed as a dangerous illusion. All large schemes of social renewal, however, cautious and qualified, attract suspicion, hostility and denunciation.52 That is not to say that some of the engagements between Marxists and those who claim to be or find themselves labelled post-Marxist are not constructive. McLennan provides what Laclau and Mouffe fail to do in a critical confrontation of Marxism and the plurality and diversity of political struggles.53 Eder attempts to develop a cultural conception of class in order to rebuild the linkage between class and the radicalism of social movements.54 To be precise, it is more often critics that use insights from post-Marxism who construct creative debates, rather than
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post-Marxists themselves. Nevertheless, there are critical questions Marxists can take away from a review of post-Marxist thinking. Some of these are, variously • the reconciliation of pluralist politics within class strategy; • the reconciliation of the specificity of political struggles within class strategy; • the juxtaposition of central political concepts of democracy, difference and autonomy within a class analysis; • the testing of theoretical determinacy by deconstructive methodological insights. These insights aside, what are we to make of post-Marxism? A pale, superficial eclecticism and relativism informed by idealist intellectual rhetoric and intellectual self-absorption and surrender from politics outside the academy and the rich pickings of the literati. A politics of mind that traps representations of political struggle within complex and aesthetically attractive language games and turns its back on the lived experience of the majority. An acceptance of the strategic gains of social democracy and the New Right as proving pluralist politics and neoliberal ideology, rather than seeing such gains as a product of political struggles and the ebb and flow of a materialist politics of exploitation and oppression against emancipation. Perhaps, to be relevant to the twenty-first century, the proletariat needs to become more multifaceted and directed at a broader emancipatory project than during the nineteenth century. Perhaps, specifically, any retheorization of the proletariat has to focus on the need for change in the private sphere and a more gender/sexuality/race/disabilityenlightened approach to struggle and agitation in the public sphere. But there is a strong argument that the proletariat retains its importance as a central part of radical thinking and change. It is still special, because it is resides at the heart of the production of social, political and economic power and is the means of the generation of that power. It is therefore uniquely placed (or positioned) to resist it. It is still transformative because it has the strategic means to undermine the basis of power in capitalist societies. It is still representative because it needs to represent to whole of the oppressed under capitalism in order to execute revolution, and the movement towards revolution involves a radicalization of worker and other segments of society – not just peasants, but women in the private sphere or gays and lesbians marginalized and suffering
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prejudice in the public realm – who come together with common cause. This position argues that Marx’s identification and representation of the proletariat is still valuable in conceiving socialist struggle. The proletariat remains a central part of a Marxist critique of capitalist society and of the strategies for usurping capitalism. This argument rebuts the critiques of determinism mounted by post-structuralists and postmodernists and argues that class relations are real, deterministic and reducible to social agency and relationships. It does argue the need for an in-depth retrieval of the proletariat and rebuttal of criticisms of the importance of the proletariat for emancipatory struggle, which would involve some development of Marx’s Manifesto discussion. It retains, however, a commitment to the importance of the Manifesto’s characterization of the proletariat – and its particular characterization of workers’ struggle. Twentieth-century thinkers such as Gramsci, Poulantzas and Therborn allow us to identify the proletariat away from the stereotype of the massed workers in manufacturing industry. The proletariat is still constituted by the everyday experience of the contradiction between what we do and what we aspire for in work, and how the rewards and nature of that production are appropriated away from us. Ironically, mass unemployment, the diversification of the working class and the mass media perpetuate those contradictions in work, in wider political debates and in culture and the arts, through the media and mass communication. The proletariat in being still occupies the centre of that contradiction, a position which radicalizes as people experience it or are inculcated with it by a socialist intelligentsia, and catalyses their becoming a revolutionary class in a hegemonic struggle against capitalist oppression. The Manifesto, as a call to arms to this proletariat against the vagaries of capitalism, is still a potent document. We should not throw the proletarian baby out with the ‘dated’ water of nineteenthcentury mass political struggle. What it requires is for us to reconceive its call – with this latter section no more than a sketch of the issues – for today.55 I would be the first to accept that this analysis is open to criticism. This survey of post-Marxism, however, seems to me to offer too little to replace or supplant such a view of the needs of radical politics to be a feasible project. Post-Marxism does not move beyond Marxism. Rather, by intellectual sleight of hand or by a misguided exaggeration of the failure of a caricatured representation of Marxism,
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post-Marxism fails to offer any serious theoretical or political challenge to Marxism.
Notes 1. This view is represented in texts such as S. Seidman (ed.), The Postmodern Turn: New Directions in Social Theory (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994) (extracts from many of the classic texts in post structuralist and postmodern thought); S. Crook, J. Pakulski and M. Waters, Postmodernisation (London, Sage, 1992); H. Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London, Routledge, 1995). 2. Selectively, H. Hartmann ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union’, in I. Sargent (ed.), The unhappy marriage of Marxism and Feminism: A debate on Class and Patriarchy (London, Pluto Press, 1981); R. Coward, Patriarchal Precedent: Sexuality and Social Relations (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); J. Gabriel and G. Ben Tovim, ‘Marxism and the Concept of Racism’, Economy and Society 7/2, 1978. 3. Selectively, S. Seidman, Contested Knowledge: Social Theory in the Postmodern Era (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1994); M. Barrett, The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (Cambridge, Polity, 1991). 4. For example, J. Femia, Marxism and Democracy (Oxford, Oxford University Press). 5. The focus of this paper is those who explicitly hold that their position is post-Marxist, but that is not to say that other theorists cannot be seen as post-Marxist. The possibilities of such an identitification are bewildering: was Marx the first post-Marxist? There is a strong case for Bernstein’s embrace of parliamentary socialism, for example! The term is most notably associated with the writings of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: see E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, Verso, 1985); E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, ‘Post-Marxism Without Apologies’, New Left Review 166, Nov.–Dec. 1987, 79–106; E. Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London, Verso, 1990); C. Mouffe, Dimensions of Radical Democracy (London, Verso, 1992); C. Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London, Verso, 1993); E. Laclau and L. Zac ‘Minding the Gap: The Subject of Politics’, in E. Laclau (ed.), The Making of Political Identities (London, Verso, 1994) pp. 11–39; E. Laclau Emancipation(s) (London, Verso, 1996). 6. S. Sim, Post-Marxism: A Reader (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998) p. 2. 7. N. Geras, ‘Post-Marxism?’, New Left Review 163, May–June 1987; ‘Ex-Marxism Without Substance’, New Left Review 169, May–June 1988. These essays are reproduced in N. Geras, Discourses of Extremity: Radical Ethics and Post-Marxist Extravagances (London, Verso, 1990). Page numbers in this paper refer to the 1990 publication. 8. Geras, ‘Ex-Marxism Without Substance’ (note 7), p. 128. 9. This is not a rejection of Marx’s analysis as scientific, but it does point to the context and meaning of science of society in the mid to late nineteenth century.
Post-Marxism 277 10. For a robust defence of reductionism, essentialism, universalism and functionalism see G. McLennan, ‘Post-Marxism and the Four Sins of Modernist Theorising’, New Left Review 218, July–Aug. 1996, 53–74. 11. The debate is not germane to this essay, but for discussion of the relative autonomy of the state, see B. Jessop, The Capitalist State (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982). 12. For different and interesting discussions of the relationship between Gramscian Marxism and the theories and ideas which are perceived as superceding them, see R. Holub, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Post-Modernism (London, Routledge, 1992); and D. Harris, From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: The Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies (London, Routledge, 1992). It is not necessary to agree with either author to take the point that there is a tension between acknowledging Marxist antecedents and at the same time using them as jumping off points for different political and cultural projects. 13. Geras, ‘Post-Marxism?’ (note 7), makes a similar point, p. 66. 14. In what follows, further reading is provided by A. Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge, Polity, 1989) esp. ch. 5; A. Sivanandan, ‘All That Melts into Air is Solid: The Hokum of New Times’, Race and Class 31/3, 1990, 1–30; A. Sinfield, Literature Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989); B. Martin, A Sociology Of Contemporary Cultural Change (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1981). 15. Typically in S. Brittan, The Economic Contradictions of Democracy (London, Temple Smith, 1977), but the same idea is explored in C. Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State (London, Hutchinson, 1982). 16. Selectively, see D. Caute, ’68: The Year of the Barricades (London, Paladin, 1988); C. Harman, The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After (London, Bookmarks, 1988). 17. Classically, represented in F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, Free Press, 1992). 18. For example, see T. Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia (London, Bookmarks, 1988); E. Mandel, Revolutionary Marxism Today (London, New Left Books, 1979); R. Silverman, Bureaucratism or Workers Power? (London, World Books, 1975). 19. Z. Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London, Routledge, 1992) pp. 175–86: ‘Living Without an Alternative’. 20. Geras, ‘Post-Marxism’ (note 7). 21. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (note 5). 22. Laclau and Mouffe, ‘Post-Marxism without Apologies’ (note 5). 23. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (note 5); Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (note 5); Mouffe, Dimensions of Radical Democracy (note 5); Mouffe, The Return of the Political (note 5). For a set of essays which elaborate and develop the ideas of radical democracy, see D. Trend (ed.), Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship and the State (London, Routledge, 1996). 24. See M. Foucault ‘Truth and Power’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1991). 25. Sim, Post-Marxism (note 6). 26. See, selectively, J. Pakulski, Social Movements: The Politics of Moral Protest
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27.
28. 29.
30.
31.
32.
33. 34. 35. 36.
37. 38.
39. 40. 41.
(Melbourne, Longman Cheshire, 1991); R. Dalton and M. Kuechler (eds), Challenging the Political Order: New Social and Political Movements in Western Democracies (Cambridge, Polity, 1990); J. Craig Jenkins and B. Klandermans (eds), The Politics of Social Protest (London, UCL Press, 1995); T. Sandler, Collective Action: Theory and Applications (Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). S. Hall and M. Jacques (eds), New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1989); S. Wilks (ed.), Talking About Tomorrow (London, Pluto Press, 1993); D. Miliband (ed.), Reinventing the Left (Cambridge, Polity, 1994); G. Mulgan, Politics in an Age of Anti-Politics (Cambridge, Polity, 1994); G. Mulgan (ed.), Life After Politics (London, Fontana, 1997); A. Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Polity, 1994) (this was the third volume of his ‘contemporary critique of historical materialism); P. Hirst, From Statism to Pluralism (London, UCL Press, 1997). Elaborated in M. Barrett, The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (Cambridge, Polity, 1991). See, for example, D. Silverman, Facing Postmodernity: Contemporary French Thought (London, Routledge, 1999); J. Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London, HarperCollins/Flamingo, 1993). J. Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London, Flamingo, 1994). Clearly other factors, such as Foucault’s personal preoccupation’s with pain, sexuality and death, partly expressed through his sado-masochism, are influential to his thought, as much as his critical engagements with, for example, French Marxism and structuralism. J-F. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (London, Athlone Press, 1993). Lyotard’s analysis is weakened by his oversubscription to ‘subjective’ discourses on Marx’s working practice rather than a more thoughtful and less stereotyped critique of Marx’s thought, and particularly his political economy. J. Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London, Routledge, 1994); F. Jameson, ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter’, New Left Review, 1995, provides a more thoughtful and critical review of how Derrida reflects a constructive critical engagement with Marxism. S. Best and D. Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (London, Macmillan, 1991) p. 181. S. Sim, Post-Marxism (note 6), pp. 9–10. A. Sivanandan, ‘All that Melts into Air is Solid’ (note 14), p. 23. A. Callinicos, ‘Reactionary Postmodernism’, in R. Boyne and A. Rattansi (eds), Postmodernism and Society (London, Macmillan, 1990) pp. 97–118 – quotation p. 115. The classic example of this triumphalism is F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (note 17). D. Cloud, ‘Socialism of the Mind: The New Age of Post-Marxism’, in M. Billig and H. Simons (eds), After Postmodernism: Reconstructing Ideology Critique (London, Sage, 1994) pp. 222–51. B. Frankel, ‘Confronting Neo-Liberal Regimes: The Post-Marxist Embrace of Populism and Realpolitik’, New Left Review 226, Nov.–Dec. 1997, 57–92. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (note 5), p. 176. Mouffe, The Return of the Political (note 5), p. 7.
Post-Marxism 279 42. 43. 44. 45.
46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.
D. Forgacs, ‘Dethroning the Working Class’, Marxism Today, May 1985, 43. S. Aronowitz, ‘Theory and Socialist Strategy’, Social Text, 1986–87, 1–16. Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory (note 33), pp. 200–5. E. Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995). Wood’s critique of Laclau/Mouffe and the radical democratic project is first developed in The Retreat from Class (London, Verso, 1986). Ibid. p. 290. P. Dews, Logics of Disintegration (London, Verso, 1987). J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Polity, 1987). G. McLennan, ‘Post-Marxism and the Four Sins of Modernist Theorizing’ (note 10). Callinicos, Against Postmodernism (note 14). Ibid. p. 6. R. Miliband, Socialism in a Sceptical Age (Cambridge, Polity, 1994) p. 69. G. McLennan, Marxism, Pluralism and Beyond (Cambridge, Polity, 1989). K. Eder, The New Politics of Class (London, SAGE, 1993). The last three paragraphs are based on P. Reynolds, ‘What About the Workers?: The Proletariat and the Politics of the Communist Manifesto’, Studies in Marxism 4, 1998, 111–37.
14 The Post-Marxist Critique of Marxism: The Case of Agnes Heller Simon Tormey*
In considering the relevance of Marxism ‘at the Millennium’ we are inevitably drawn to an assessment not just of Marxism’s credentials but also those of its ideological and theoretical competitors. Judged by the amount of attention received in recent years one of the most important developments within the discourse of left radicalism has been the emergence of a post-Marxist ‘movement’ (Stuart Sim’s description1) whose goal has been to transcend Marxism as a body of ideas and mode of practice. The best known work of ‘post-Marxism’ is of course Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, but the attention this work has received should not detract from the fact that the ideas articulated within it not only have long provenance but have been expressed in similar form by prominent thinkers since at least the 1960s.2 Nevertheless, part of the appeal of the work is, evidently, the sense of the break from the unfashionable tenets of historical materialism together with the rendition of a ‘new’ politics built on the twin themes of the ‘democratic revolution’ and the embrace of pluralism and heterogeneity. The problem, as Norman Geras spells out in his notorious ‘review’ of the book, is the undeveloped nature of the analysis.3 Nowhere do they spell out the nature of the radical democracy they seek to foster, how it is to be advanced as a project, or by whom (beyond some airy gestures in the direction of New Social Movements). This is especially infuriating as part of post-Marxism’s claim is that it represents the future of left radical politics. Yet without some account of what it they want to construct or how they intend to go about attaining it, it is difficult to see how such a movement would escape the confines of the seminar room and attain the status of ‘material force’. It follows that to assess the relevance and credibility of the politics of post-Marxism we need to draw upon work from elsewhere. 280
Agnes Heller’s Post-Marxism 281
Of those who share many of the assumptions informing Laclau and Mouffe’s work the theorist who has explored these issues in arguably the most systematic (and accessible) fashion is Agnes Heller, not a ‘postMarxist’ by self-description, but a thinker whose analysis comes very close to their position. Like them, she comes from a Marxist background, albeit of a ‘humanist’ rather than a structuralist variety. She, like them, has developed an alternative account of modernity which lays great emphasis on the relative autonomy of the spheres of state and civil society; on the inevitably plural character of modern identities; on the contingent character of human action; and hence on the impossibility of a teleological account of history and human essence. Heller, however, has gone much further – because of starting much earlier – in developing a political theory commensurate with the changes in her philosophical and theoretical position. The idea of, for example, a ‘radical democracy’ has been fully mapped out and explored in the course of the more general exploration of alternatives to Marx, as has a view of citizenship appropriate to what Heller terms the ‘postmodern political condition’. As a way of anticipating the further development of a post-Marxist political theory, the purpose of this paper is to consider Heller’s work in relation to three key concepts in the armoury of the post-Marxist critique of Marxism: autonomy, democracy, and contingency.
From humanism to post-Marxism While never calling herself a ‘post-Marxist’ but rather a humanist and then ‘critical’ Marxist, reading Laclau and Mouffe it is immediately evident how much of their analysis is shared by Heller. The most important similarity is in their shared view of the inadequacy of historical materialism as an explanation of the development of modernity. Heller, it has to be said, never demonstrated any great attachment to the fundamentals of historical materialism even at the stage when she was happy to accept the appellation ‘Marxist’. Her Marxism was that of the Manuscripts rather of Capital, of Lukacs’s Heidelburg Aesthetics rather than of History and Class Consciousness, of Otto Bauer and ‘Austro-Marxism’ rather than of Lenin or Luxemburg. It is this reservoir of anthropologically and ethically centred material which informs the earlier works we associate with her humanist Marxist phase such as Renaissance Man (1967), Everyday Life (1968) and A Theory of Needs in Marx (1972). It is this material which in turn makes her question the necessitarian interpretation of historical materialism which solidified into ‘histomat’, and
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which encouraged her scepticism towards, inter alia, the reduction of consciousness and ‘everyday life’ more generally to an epiphenomenon of material forces; of questions of justice and ethics to questions of ‘administration’; and of human emancipation to the satisfaction of needs. Especially troublesome to Heller was the issue of revolutionary theory and practice and what she saw as the belittling of the role of the individual as actor. Given this background it is hardly surprising that Heller felt deep antipathy to the as she saw it determinist underpinnings of historical materialism. In A Theory of History published in 1982 she finally broke with the base/superstructure account of modernity in favour of an explanation which stressed the contingent and hence ‘openended’ character of the historical process.4 Her account of modernity, which stresses the interplay of three ‘logics’ – industrialisation, democracy and capitalism – is thus by design descriptive rather than explanatory, helping us, as she sees it, to ‘orientate’ ourselves to modernity rather than to suggest how it might evolve or develop.5 Her account is built on the foundations of as she puts it a ‘theory’ rather than a ‘philosophy’ of history of the sort she, in common with post-structuralist critics of ‘totalizing discourse’, associates with Marxism, and which she argues is determinist, teleological and suffocating. Each of these logics is a feature of modernity but none determine the path of historical development. Nor can one logic be said to determine the rate of development or character of the other two so that we could say that one logic is functionally prior to the others. It is us who make or determine history, not impersonal forces or logics. Thus as she puts it, ‘History does not “march forward” because it does not march at all. We march, walk or crawl in a self-created world’.6 Modernity therefore begets plurality, heterogeneity and incommensurability. With the erasure of traditional, static communities built on relations of hierarchy and domination comes the consciousness of ourselves as self-determinate beings: ‘free’ men and women born ‘equal’ by virtue of our being ‘thrown into the world’.7 Identities are, in Heller’s analysis, self-chosen rather than being functionally determined in accordance with the accident of birth. ‘Class’, ‘nation’ and ‘race’ are best conceptualized as self-descriptions, not objectively assignable categories able to explain individual motivation and behaviour. ‘Individualism’ is not therefore so much a political philosophy as a description of modern consciousness, of how we think about ourselves. Modernity thus produces agents with the selfknowledge of their own potential to shape the world of which they
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are a part. We are free to the extent that we perceive ourselves as possessing ‘destinies’ rather than ‘fates’.8 ‘Redemption’ and ‘damnation’, the politics of teleological philosophies of history, have ceased to be relevant. The question is, what sort of politics is relevant in a secular, sceptical world in which the confrontation of classes has been displaced by the interplay of contingent individuals?
The antinomies of autonomy It should hardly come as a surprise given the analysis above that the development of her account of modernity should be accompanied by an increasing hostility to what she sees as the Marxian tendency to reduce the role of the individual in the making of history to a subordinate role behind the development of material forces. As well as producing a distorted analysis of the dynamics of modern society, one of the effects of this stance is a necessarily instrumental attitude to the person which has damaging consequences when applied to the sphere of social and political life. Trotsky’s remark that one has ‘to break eggs to make an omelette’ is for Heller symptomatic of the hyperutilitarianism commensurate with a belief in historical necessity rather than an adumbration produced by the particular exigencies of civil war. In her view there is a fundamental inconsistency in the notion that the goal of universal emancipation justifies the subjection of those who because of their class affiliation or position in society represent an obstacle to that goal. First, the notion of ‘emancipation’ is itself problematical given the consciousness of ourselves as always-already constituted as free subjects.9 Second, an ethics which is prepared to countenance the use of others as mere means for the realization of some allegedly superior end is the same logic that is prepared to justify the Gulag in the name of human happiness. Thus for Heller the recognition of the autonomy of the individual qua end in him or herself is the starting point for a rational political philosophy, not its product. The problem in her view is that instead of being used as a basis from which to criticize existing society for the degree to which the individual is reduced to a mere means for the realization of the goals of others, this essentially Kantian idea of the autonomous individual as the creation of modernity has been developed by neo-liberals as an excuse for a defence of the status quo and the rationality of market relations. Autonomy might be constituted by modern consciousness, but this does not equate to the realization of autonomy at the level of everyday life or indeed at
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the level of economic, social and political relations. So then what kind of society is entailed by an attachment to the value of autonomy and more broadly to the ‘universal values’ of life and freedom? Looking back over her work since the 1960s, it is interesting to note the apparent continuities in her thinking about the necessary constituents of a just society. Throughout her writings we see repeated calls for the development and extension of ‘symmetric reciprocity’, ‘radical tolerance’, and until relatively recently even ‘the positive abolition of private property’.10 What underpins these concepts is a deep commitment to the idea of a society of equals and hence of an end to hierarchy, subordination and domination in all its guises. The difference as she sees it between her starting point and Marx’s is the acceptance on her part of the inevitability of relative scarcity and thus of conflict, competition and rivalry. There is no getting away in other words from the necessity of developing political institutions and structures so as to manage and implement agreed strategies to implement social justice. There is no ‘beyond justice’ in this sense. Rather, we have continually to review and develop regulatory ideals which conform to our shared ideas about what justice is so that we can measure the degree to which distributions and relationships embody those ideals. Furthermore, as these concerns are the very substance of the political, the idea of a society ‘beyond the state’ is an equally misguided one. The state is a powerful instrument for ensuring justice. In her critical Marxist phase Heller interpreted this vision of symmetric reciprocity as demanding radical changes to the character and functioning of modern societies. In an article first published in 1980 she equates the call for equality with the necessity of empowering the community to judge between competing needs to ensure that the productive process does not demean or enslave – as she believed it did in both capitalist and state socialist societies. As she then argued, ‘All needs should be acknowledged and satisfied with the exception of those whose satisfaction would make man into a mere means for the other. The categorical imperative has, therefore, a restrictive function in the assessment of needs’.11 In state socialist societies the individual is ‘privileged’ as worker, but not as consumer while the state controls all matters to do with production and distribution implying only a ‘negative’ abolition of private property in what the Budapest School memorably – if misleadingly – termed a ‘dictatorship over needs’.12 In capitalist society the market system ensures the autonomy of the person qua consumer, but not as producer. The positive abolition of private property means on the other hand, retrieving the idea of autonomy as a relation extend-
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ing to all aspects of social and economic functioning not just some parts of it. Reflecting her interest in contemporary liberal theory (and her engagement with an American agenda after moving to New York), by 1987 Heller was experimenting in Beyond Justice with the idea of autonomy as equality of ‘life chances’, a familiar demand of radical welfare economists which calls for the redistribution of resources to eliminate the effect of class and initial social position on a person’s life prospects.13 As Heller argues, what this means is in effect ensuring that everyone’s talents and endowments are developed to the maximum possible extent and hence that no cultural factor is allowed to impede his or her progress. But what she goes on to argue is that the satisfaction of all other needs not connected with the development of endowments should be regarded as a secondary matter. In other words, the bulk of societal resources would be directed towards the development of individual talents and endowments rather than towards the satisfaction of needs through the market. Again, the radicalism of the suggestion is undeniable in that what is implied is society’s right not just to ensure that provision is made for social welfare (for example through taxation), but to dispose over all the fruits of production. While lacking the participatory thrust of the earlier article the implication is clear: the goal of production is not profit or individual enrichment, but the development of the capacities of each person. Even here she has not moved far from the Marxian sentiment that ‘the condition for the free development of each is the free development of all’.14 Since Beyond Justice it is becoming evident, however, that Heller has revised her view that the promotion of ‘symmetric reciprocity’ and ‘radical tolerance’ require major let alone radical changes to the basic structure of liberal-capitalism. In, for example, The Philosophy of Morals, published in 1990, symmetric reciprocity is discussed in terms of individual moral conduct rather than as a collective project necessitating radical change.15 Autonomy is here regarded as a quality achieved between individuals who respect each other as ends. What is required to bring about symmetric reciprocity is not, therefore, institutional change or redistribution of resources, but ‘that persons with self-esteem respect the person-hood of other persons with self-esteem’.16 Similarly the recognition of all needs (which has been a constant demand of Heller since the 1970s) now equates to the demand that we merely tolerate the ‘expression’ of individual needs. Nowhere is it implied that this expression imposes an obligation on society to satisfy those needs or (more weakly) ensure that those who control the means of production
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be made to respond to the identification of unsatisfied needs. In this way the demand for substantive structural change becomes a demand merely for formal safeguards protecting free speech and interest group activity. The ‘recognition of all needs’ which once seemed such a radical demand and which spurred Heller to declare that as ‘a radical socialist principle’ it is ‘incompatible with the liberal tradition’ now seems to involve little more than ensuring that we are not formally prevented from articulating our individual or collective wants.17 Thus as long as the homeless are not physically prevented from demanding housing in relevant public forums, etc., the ideal of radical tolerance is presumably met. Equally, as long as two homeless people treat each other as ‘persons of self-esteem’ the ideal of symmetric reciprocity would be met as well. This emphasis on the personal rather the societal dimension of autonomy may be a reflection of her pessimism about the immediate prospects for the sort of radical changes she recently advocated, but in view of other changes in her thought (which I deal with below) it is difficult not to conclude that it represents the displacement of a Marxian-inspired conception of ‘autonomy’ as the development of the ‘many-sided individual’ by a more formally Kantian model which insists that it is the way people relate to each other as individuals that determines the degree to which they are able to be considered ends in themselves. We have already noted Heller’s anxiety about the degree to which philosophies of history in general (and historical materialism in particular) submerge the individual as actor and bearer of his or her own interests under ideas of the collective good, and what has clearly taken root since the publication of A Theory of History is the notion of autonomy as ineliminably deontological in character. She finds it unbearable to countenance the idea that individuals might have to be ‘used’ in order to bring about a form of society in which individuals could finally become ends in themselves. In her view it is simply inconsistent to argue that the cause of human emancipation allows or, worse, necessitates an instrumental or utilitarian attitude to the person. No cause is evidently so great or so just that it justifies the sacrifice of a single human life. As Heller, quoting Collingwood, puts it, ‘there can be no progress with losses’.18 This is an understandable sentiment which reflects Heller’s close hand experience with the consequences of, as it were, institutionalized utilitarianism of the sort found in Communist Eastern Europe; but it is a sentiment that sits uneasily alongside the call for radical social change. The proposals she has offered even relatively recently concerning, for
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example, ‘the positive abolition of private property’ and the extension of the principle of self-management equate to the call for a massive shift of wealth and power from private individuals towards the community. Since all such moves have been met in the past with resistance by those whose wealth and power is under threat, it follows that to remain true to her ethics Heller has a dilemma to resolve. It is surely inconsistent after all to be advocating what in effect amounts to a social revolution while at the same time holding that there can be ‘no progress where there are losses’. Either, therefore, she has to tone down the proposals so that a consensus might conceivably be reached on the necessary conditions for the realization of autonomy, or she has to accept that the cost of political radicalism is a ‘minimal utilitarianism’ permitting some losses where these are greatly outweighed by the gains. On the evidence presented so far, it is clear that Heller has opted for the former rather than the latter option, allowing the radical egalitarian dimension of her thought to give way to an explicitly moral conception offering (as she sees it) the possibility of realizing autonomy by way of the observance of ‘moral maxims’. Indeed, it is no longer clear that Heller has a political theory as opposed to an ethical theory. So insistent has she recently become about the necessity of recognizing the (Kantian) autonomy of each individual that it is now difficult to see how any sort of political project is to be advanced. If we cannot weigh losses against gains, if we cannot decide between courses of action by reference to the relative benefits each delivers, then we cannot act ‘politically’ in the sense of pursuing a given vision of social justice, for such action always ‘hurts’ someone whether in the form of increased tax, loss of proprietary rights, or some other disbenefit and thus incurs ‘losses’ on Heller’s terms. Acceptance of an apparently noble maxim of conduct thus paralyses the political actor and forces him or her not only to accept the status quo, but to forfeit the possibility of acting against those untroubled by such niceties. Collective action for collective goals gives way to the celebration of moral excellence; political radicalism gives way to well-meaning gestures of sympathy and support, and all the while those structures of domination and subordination which Heller once so vehemently opposed are left intact.
Power to the people? Like Laclau and Mouffe, Heller makes much of the idea of centrality of democracy to any vision of viable socialist project, the implicit criticism of course being that this has not been central to the classical Marxist
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project. Like them, ‘the radicalisation of democracy’ was seen as the vehicle for the establishment of socialism. And, like them, Heller is keen to stress the degree to which this project is entailed in as she puts it the ‘logic of democracy’ (Laclau and Mouffe use the term ‘the democratic revolution’) so that the realization of socialism should not be seen as a break (or coupure in structuralist lingo) with the present, but rather the full realization of the potential contained in the present, more specifically in the uncoupling of state and civil society which is the achievement of modernity. However, whereas Laclau and Mouffe remain vague about what the radicalisation of democracy involves, Heller until relatively recently advocated a participatory model of socialism thoroughly familiar to Marxists raised on the writings of Luxemburg and Pannekoek.19 At certain moments in the 1970s and 1980s we find her putting forward a substantive, participatory model of democracy going far beyond the notion of the state as the mere underwriter of the autonomy of civil society to embrace the idea of citizen involvement in all aspects of social functioning. In the ‘Great Republic’ (as she called it) the distinction between producer and consumer, between ruler and ruled and participant and spectator finally dissolved in favour of the omniscient citoyen.20 ‘Humankind’, she writes, ‘would be “liberated” if every human person had the right and the equal possibility of participating in the decision-making processes affecting the present and the future of mankind’.21 Again, the radicalism of this view of the democratic ideal is undeniable presupposing the general extension of the principle of selfmanagement to all aspects of social, economic and political life. Some of the detail might differ from that offered by other Marxists (in particular her stress in the ineliminability of ‘relative scarcity’, the necessity for formally delineated rights and for representative institutions running alongside participatory organs); but this account remains true to the spirit of the democratic socialist tradition. What is curious, however, is that the demand for the radicalization of democracy is accompanied by a defence of existing forms of democracy, in particular of ‘formal’ or liberal democracy and hence of a separation between rulers and ruled. What is all the more curious is that she holds up the ‘Declaration of Independence’ as a model basis for a radically democratic society, quoting Ho Chi Minh in support of the contention that nothing written here precludes the development of a socialist society.22 This is, to be clear, a document written by those whose goal was, as the Founding Fathers saw it, to ‘protect’ the individual from the encroachments of the state and to ensure that his or her rights to ‘liberty’ and
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‘the pursuit of happiness’ are not sacrificed in the name of the collective good. How, we need to know, can the pursuit of a radical democracy and the positive abolition of private property proceed from a political system whose ethos is permeated by the desire to protect private property and, by extension, a negative conception of freedom? In common with the post-Marxist venture in general, it is evident that Heller wants – and needs – to conflate the concept of democracy with the idea of self-government. For any system to be described as democratic it must in some sense allow for the collective determination of the laws and rules under which society operates. To limit the possibility or potential for change is to rail against the essence of ‘the democratic’. Thus as Heller puts it, ‘The principles of formal democracy do regulate our way of proceeding in social affairs, the manner of delivering our conflicts, but they do not impose any limitations on the content of our social objectives’.23 Given this understanding of democracy as a realm of contingency and possibility it should hardly be surprising that Heller is critical of the traditional left radical view that the establishment of substantive or radical democracy requires the overthrow of existing institutions. Nor, therefore, should it be surprising that she berates Marx for not accepting that ‘the radicalisation of democracy could be conceived as a process within the established framework of an already existing democracy’.24 On these terms the reasoning is faultless. If democracy is the institutional vehicle for the expression of social needs as expressed through civil society then anyone seeking to overthrow ‘democracy’ is by definition a usurper. Democracy is the institutionalization of the contingency that lies at the heart of the modern condition. It has futurity inscribed in its essence and as such can by definition be ‘the home of liberals and anti-liberals alike’.25 Proposed changes to the fabric of social life can and must – to be legitimate – come from within. This attempt to maintain the commensurability of the notions of formal/representative and substantive/participatory democracy is a crucial part of Heller’s attempts to keep afloat her particular brand of ‘robust reformism’ and as such can be taken as typical of the postMarxist desire to avoid a ‘politics of confrontation’. Not being able to run these concepts under the same banner would force her either to accept the limitations imposed by acting within the confines of ‘humdrum politics’ of the sort found in normal liberal-democratic politics, or to argue that the radicalization of democracy requires the overthrow or displacement of existing institutions and structures. The fact that the historical record has not thrown up a single successful instance of democracy being radicalized in the fashion she describes does not
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appear to have dulled the sense of ‘possibility’ she perceives in contemporary democratic systems. Nor does the fact that whenever regimes have come to power promising radical change they have been met with aggression by those seeking to reassert individual property rights and ‘restore’ democracy. The example of Salvador Allende’s regime in Chile surely provides a salutary lesson in the perils faced by popularly elected, law-abiding left radicals in their attempts to promote just the sort of ideals advanced by Heller. What is all the more bemusing in this discussion is that those who defend liberal democracy do so because it provides a bulwark against radicalism. This is why the Founding Fathers were so insistent on implementing the doctrine of the separation of powers, the provision of checks and balances and the dispersal of power between federal authorities and the states; and it is why liberal thinkers since Locke have been prepared to countenance rule by the people’s ‘representatives’ while at the same time evincing deep hostility to the notion of genuine popular rule. The point is, democratic institutions have been seen as a guarantor of liberal rights. It thus follows that where democratic government has failed to protect those rights it has generally been opposed by liberals concerned to protect the ‘individual’ and ‘his’ property. Stable, sober government which concentrates on the day-to-day tasks of economic management and social policy is the objective, not the offering up of power to those without the ‘insight’, ‘rationality’ or ‘training’ to handle it for themselves. Liberal democracy has long been seen by its advocates as a realm not of ‘possibility’ as Heller suggests, but of ‘closure’, of safety and certainty. This is an analysis which has been borne out by two centuries of constitutional development in which the most radical forms of intervention have been social democratic in nature and offered in a package meant to reassure those ‘threatened’ by the onset of ‘collectivist’ policies that such measures are needed to stabilize or enhance capitalism’s ability to reproduce itself. In short democracy has proved itself to be the best safeguard against left radicalism. What this discussion illustrates is the romantic nature of Heller’s view of the operation of power in modern political systems and her willingness to put to one side the wider social and economic context in which democracies operate and gain their legitimacy. This is a conception in which ‘possibility’ remains at the level of the abstract rather than the concrete where politics actually takes place. It is, for example, a ‘possibility’ of some sort that a left radical group might be elected on the basis of a policy ‘positively’ to abolish private property in the United States or to redistribute property on the basis of individual needs rather than
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capacity to pay, and such scenarios are certainly not ruled out in logical terms. But a moment’s reflection – if that – confirms that such a possibility is remote to say the least in concrete terms, that is, in terms of how such systems actually work. None the less it very much is the abstract possibility that Heller is interested in and which serves to sustain her particular stance. Of course the other possibility which might make more sense of what otherwise seems a contradictory position is that Heller has, as was suggested above, abandoned the desire to advance a radical egalitarian project in favour of encouraging the awareness of ourselves as ‘alwaysalready’ free by virtue of our moral and ethical autonomy. The suggestion might then be that whatever purpose democracy serves it most certainly is not the pursuit of a larger vision of social harmony or equality. Thus the ‘possibility’ that democracy represents might now be the possibility of the individual to pursue his or her own ends without the interference of the state. The ‘boundlessness’ of such possibility is of course that afforded by what the individual has a right to do, and more pertinently by what he or she can afford to do; but within formally delimited boundaries he or she has possibilities which it is up to him or her to realize and make the most of. Such a vision is certainly consistent with a deontological ethics of the sort she now proposes. It is also consistent, however, with a liberal rather than left radical view of the proper relationship between the individual and the state. There is little here after all that J. S. Mill or Isaiah Berlin would object to. Could it be that this is less ‘ex-Marxism’ as Geras puts it, than a revived liberalism able to draw inspiration from arguments and ideas almost diametrically opposed to those embraced by socialists? The dialectic of equality and contingency As should be apparent from the above, Heller gives the strong impression that in an important sense with the establishment of democratic institutions and procedures the political phase in the liberation of humanity is over. ‘Democracy’, as she puts it, ‘is the absolute present, encompassing the past of present and the future of present’.26 This notion of the potential contained within the present is a persistent motif in the work of post-Marxists who stress on the one hand the redundancy of any teleological eschatology which posits revolution as the moment of universal redemption, and on the other stress the boundlessness of the post/modern in terms of offering opportunities for continuous self redefinition. As we noted above this is a conception of democracy as embodiment of contingency and possibility, of infinitude
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and praxis. Democracy allows us to pursue our dreams and fantasies, experiment with personal or collective utopias, be who we want to be without being made subject to other people’s conceptions of how we should live. Democracy, in short, allows us to be free. While the identification of modern consciousness with freedom may sound complacent to those attempting to advance a politics of liberation or emancipation, it is at least not intended by Heller to be so. What it is intended to imply is that considered as a project to be pursued through institutional and structural change the pursuit of ‘freedom’ has been superseded by developments in the evolution of modern consciousness. The politics of freedom is a politics of ‘Grand Narratives’ and ‘Radical Universalism’. It is a politics which offers ‘redemption’ for those formally trapped by accident of birth in roles, classes and circumstances beyond their control. This is the essence of the modern which was itself born in revolution and the sweeping away of everything that once seemed so ‘solid’; and it is the reason why the modern seems to have such a volatile, iconoclastic and dramatic feel to it. But these conceptions are now themselves rendered antique by the evolution of the consciousness of ourselves as, in Kierkegaard’s terms, ‘thrown into the world’. The achievement of the sense of contingency which we all now share is the foundation of what she terms the ‘postmodern political condition’. The contemporary or ‘postmodern’ imagination is one that is hostile to all forms of teleological thinking, and so is one for which ideologies lose attractiveness, the definition of an ideology being in this case a narrative account of the overcoming of alienation, injustice, etc.27 It is an imagination which promotes a feeling of unlimited possibility, of being unconstrained and unencumbered by ‘necessity’. This in turn allows or makes possible the achievement of ethical and moral autonomy which she translates as the power ‘to destine ourselves to become the good person who we are’.28 As she reminds us, it might well be difficult to choose between two courses of action to promote the good; but we can never argue that we do not know what goodness is. It stares us in the face every day whether in the form of examples in everyday life or through art and literature. If this is the case then why, Heller asks, do we require a revolution to create the good life when the good life is nothing more than the promotion of good conduct? Why chase a utopian dream when ‘[T]he good person is utopia incarnate’?29 Coming back to an earlier point, it now seems clear that for Heller ‘symmetric reciprocity’ is now primarily a quality of personal relationships rather than something which can be engineered by legislative decree. No amount of social change will, she reasons, make society good
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if each individual ‘chooses’ to be bad. What is required is an effort of will, not a refashioning of the architecture of social life. It thus begins to appear that having identified that justice can, as in Aristotle, be equated with acting justly, it is but a short step to conclude that goodness can substitute for justice. Having made this step it is then a relatively short stride to the conclusion that questions of power and ownership have little relevance in dictating the justice or otherwise of any given relation. What is important is that in our daily lives we treat others as we would wish to be treated. In other words, we embrace the minimalist Kantian definition of autonomy while leaving ‘the metaphysics of the social question’ to the household sphere. As for Aristotle this is a world in which the point of politics is less the crude determination of who gets what, than the fostering through peideia of civilized conduct and moral rectitude. Matters previously regarded by Heller herself as subjects of public concern such as production, distribution, welfare, and the satisfaction of needs [!] are relegated to the private or household realm to be resolved by contractual arrangement. The brute energy of the Great Republic is transformed into a gentleman’s club in which good manners and a concern for others are invoked as a citizen’s chief virtues. Whether or not one finds attractive this vision of civic republicanism, we have come a long way from the radical democracy described by Heller in the work of her earlier ‘critical’ Marxist period. We have also come a long way when the fact of our contingency is taken to undermine the case for a politics of emancipation. Merely being conscious of one’s being a contingent individual is, it seems, enough to guarantee him or her the status of an ‘equal’. The reasoning is understandable, if unfortunate from the point of view of developing a left radicalism, in that it almost exactly replicates the rhetoric of freedom deployed by libertarians such as Nozick and Hayek. To libertarians like them freedom is freedom before the law. Moreover it is freedom before laws which clearly demarcate an area of individual thought, action and ownership as beyond the scope of the state. Such an account is clearly close to Heller’s own thinking. She is keen, as we would expect, to stress that with contingency comes responsibility for one’s fellow beings, which presumably translates into a Lockean duty of care to others;30 but what seems less apparent to her is how quickly the celebration of individual indeterminacy and ‘possibility’ begins to sound like a defence of the given with all its entrenched inequalities of power and influence. In short, we are struggling to find a distinction in her recent work between formal equality (equality under the law) and the equality we associate
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with her earlier conception of symmetric reciprocity, that is, equality in all spheres of social, economic and political life. What we now have in her description of the ‘postmodern imagination’ is the normative justification for the conception of equality which underpins the operation of liberal-capitalism. We really have come a long way when, as now, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell apart the content of Heller’s measured invocation of contingency and historicity from the liberal individualism she once so energetically opposed.
Conclusion Heller, it is clear, shares many if not all the presuppositions behind Hegemony and Socialist Strategy right down to the vocabulary in which it is articulated. As I have tried to show in this chapter, what Heller gives us which Laclau and Mouffe do not is a concentrated effort over many years at trying to unpack these presuppositions into something which resembles an alternative left radical political theory. It would put matters too strongly to say that this work is anticipatory, but what I do think it represents is a considered response to the problematic raised by post-Marxism which is how to refound an emancipatory discourse on the ground of the failure of historical materialism and the transformation of modern identity. The results, however, give little cause for celebration, suggesting as they do resignation in the face of superior ideological ‘forces’. The emphasis, firstly, on developing a deontological strategy instead of a utilitarian one equates to the abandonment of collective action. Of course deontology provides us with starting point for the development of a personal ethics of responsibility (which is part of Heller’s ambition), but it is difficult to see how the commitments and obligations it creates can provide the basis for acting politically. Action in the concrete orientated to changing the basic structure of society is action that by its very nature will emit of winners and losers in the concrete. ‘Radical reformism’, the second strand of Heller’s work examined here and a key element in post-Marxist ‘realism’ is a stance which can be summarized in terms of the belief in the essential injustice of current arrangements allied to a belief in the possibility of changing those arrangements from within a system whose rationale is the maintenance of them. It is not difficult to discern the contradictory character of this stance, nor the obvious sense in which inaction is the likely result. Finally, her insistence on the identity between contingency and equality makes it impossible to criticize the market order on grounds that it hampers the attainment of equality – whether in the form of equality
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of opportunity, outcome or life chances. If all ‘equality’ means is the enjoyment of basic rights and liberties then there is nothing in the structure or functioning of liberal-capitalism that requires remedying. The liberal can always claim to recognize the full ‘person-hood’ of the subject if that concept is understood in legal-formal terms. In each of these three moments what we see is thus the emptying of the idea of politics as ‘possibility’ to the point where, as she seems ready now to admit, all that is left is for us as individuals to be good or decent and thus to realize ourselves as ethical ‘utopias’, walking expressions of a Tolstoyan faith in our capacity, as he puts it, ‘to change the world by changing ourselves’. It would be easy to characterize the retreat from the political which Heller’s work evinces as a cynical exercise designed to reconcile us to our liberal-capitalist future. But thinking about Heller’s work more generally, it would I think be entirely wrong to put this slant on her thinking or on thinking of many post-Marxists. It is clearly not cynicism which characterizes their work so much as fear, more precisely, fear of the political. For post-Marxists the Owl of Minerva has well and truly flown and what is left is an awareness of the immensely damaging power of the state. Heller in particular writes as one who has seen the state’s raw power being manipulated for irrational purposes by those who justify their actions in the name of the ‘common good’. She therefore wants to ensure that Leviathan will never again be unleashed on the innocent and so her strategy is to disarm those who claim legitimacy on the basis that they know or understand what is in the best interests of the many. There is more then a whiff here of that scepticism which is such a strong feature of liberal and conservative writing during the period of the expansion of the suffrage (fear of the mob) and at the start of the cold war (fear of the Reds). Yet however rational the fears she and others have, the result is that the political is denuded of power and hence of the capacity to change for the better as well as for the worse. A ‘politics’ which proceeds from the attitude that what we already have is too precious to give up must be implicitly supportive of the status quo and hence of the social and global injustice of which Heller – before the Owl took off – was such a passionate critic.
Notes *
I acknowledge the financial support of the British Academy and the Research Committee of the University of Nottingham for my work on Heller. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Professor Heller for her generosity
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1.
2.
3. 4.
5.
6. 7.
8.
9.
10.
11. 12.
13. 14.
with her time and for forwarding a number of unpublished drafts and manuscripts. Stuart Sim, ‘Introduction: Spectres and Nostalgia: Post-Marxism/PostMarxism’, in Stuart Sim (ed.), Post-Marxism: A Reader (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998) p. 1. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1995) [hereafter HSS]. My own definition of ‘post-Marxism’ is a broad one and encompasses those such Castoriadis and Lefort as well as more obvious candidates such as Lyotard and Derrida. Norman Geras, ‘Post-Marxism?’, New Left Review 163, May–June 1987, 40–82. Agnes Heller, A Theory of History (London, Routledge, 1982). This was followed up by an important article written with Féher which explores the question of the interrelationship between the logics and the emergence of class in modern society. See their ‘Class, Democracy, Modernity’, Theory and Society, 12/2, 1983. Heller has now abandoned the three logic paradigm as her basic model of modernity. As the last of her trilogy on the subject (A Theory of Modernity) will show, she now uses the concept of ‘imagination’ to suggest differences between both pre- and postmodern forms of social life. Heller, A Theory of History (note 4), p. 208. The theme of contingency which lurks beneath all her work in the form of a classically existentialist concern with the trials of existence only really surfaces towards the end of the 1980s. See in particular Agnes Heller, ‘The Contingent Person and the Existential Choice’, Philosophical Forum 1–2, FallWinter 1989–90. This distinction between fates and destinies is a key motif of her recent work and permeates all her thinking on the nature of subjectivity. See in particular her A Philosophy of History in Fragments (Oxford, Blackwell, 1993); An Ethics of Personality (Oxford, Blackwell, 1996); and a number of the essays in Can Modernity Survive? (California, University of California Press, 1990). A notable motif throughout her work is that it is the individual who emancipates him or herself as individual, not as member of class or other collective grouping. This also explains the Nietzschean stress on the aesthetic dimension of emancipation which we find even in her ‘humanist Marxist’ works as Everyday Life. Like Marcuse (with whom she otherwise shares little), Heller always saw great potential in art for realizing the self as a higher entity. Heller is still proposing the positive abolition of private property in ‘On Formal Democracy’, an article which appeared in 1988 in John Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London, Verso, 1988) pp. 138ff. See the essay ‘Can “True” and “False” Needs be Posited?’, in Agnes Heller, The Power of Shame: A Rational Perspective (London, Routledge, 1985) p. 290. Ferenc Féher, Agnes Heller and Gyorgy Markus, The Dictatorship over Needs: An Analysis of Soviet Societies (Oxford, Blackwell, 1983). As at least one reviewer noted, Soviet-type societies did not dictate needs per se, but rather dictated which needs were to be satisfied and under what conditions. Agnes Heller, Beyond Justice (Oxford, Blackwell, 1987) pp. 195–9. For a critique of both these views of justice see my ‘The Vicissitudes of
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15.
16. 17. 18. 19.
20. 21.
22.
23. 24. 25.
26. 27.
‘Radical Centrism’: The Case of Agnes Heller, Radical Centrist Avant la Lettre’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 3/2, June 1998, 152–7. See the discussion in Agnes Heller, The Philosophy of Morals (Oxford, Blackwell, 1990) pp. 89–107; see also the article ‘Rights, Modernity, Democracy’ in Can Modernity Survive? (note 8), where she identifies symmetric reciprocity with contingency thereby effectively identifying the former with modernity per se. As she puts it: ‘There is no longer a “social pyramid”. The modern world is flat because it is symmetrical’, p. 152. Heller, Philosophy of Morals (note 15), p. 93. Agnes Heller and Ferenc Féher, ‘Equality Reconsidered’, Thesis Eleven 3, 1981, 57. A Theory of History (note 4), p. 300. See, for example, Agnes Heller and Ferenc Féher, ‘The Fear of Power. A Contribution to the Genesis and Morphology of Eurocommunism’, Thesis Eleven 2, 1981. They discuss here, as they put it, a ‘new type of democracy: a combination of the representative system with direct democracy’, p. 157. The closest Laclau and Mouffe get to a definition of radical democracy is ‘the autonomization of spheres on the basis of the generalization of the equivalential-egalitarian logic’, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (note 2), p. 167. I assume this means something like people should be equal in whatever realm of life they are operating. See Agnes Heller, ‘The Great Republic’, in Praxis International 5/1, April 1985. Agnes Heller, ‘Marx and the Liberation of Humankind’, in Philosophy and Social Criticism 9/3–4, 1982, 367. We should note that she now explicitly rejects direct democracy as opposed to representative democracy viewing the former as being based on ‘blood relations and of being rooted in the same soil’; Agnes Heller, ‘With Castoriadis to Aristotle: From Aristotle to Kant: From Kant to us’, in Agnes Heller and Ferenc Féher, The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism (New Brunswick, Transaction, 1991) p. 500. See the opening comments of Agnes Heller, ‘Past, Present and Future of Democracy’, in Social Research 45/4, Winter 1978, 866–86, and especially, Agnes Heller, ‘The Declaration of Independence and the Principles of Socialism: Contribution to a Discussion’, in Social Praxis 1–2/6, 1979. Heller, ‘On Formal Democracy’ (note 10), p. 133. Agnes Heller, ‘Marx and Modernity’, Thesis Eleven 8, 1984, 52. Agnes Heller, ‘Where at we at Home?’, Thesis Eleven 41, 1995, 14. For similar sentiments in Laclau and Mouffe, see Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (note 2), pp. 156–7. Heller, ‘Where are we at Home?’ (note 25), p. 16. In describing this position I’m now drawing upon some of Heller’s most recent and in some cases as yet unpublished work, in particular A Theory of Modernity which had not been published at the time of writing. However, readers will glean some idea of the direction of Heller’s thought if they consult the interview I conducted with her in July 1998, part of which was published as ‘Post-Marxism and the Ethics of Modernity’ in Radical Philosophy 94, March–April 1999, 29–39. The full text of the interview is published in a special edition of the Spanish journal Daimon: Revista de Logica devoted to examining her recent work (17, 1998) and also in successive issues of Sinn und Form to be published (in German) over the course of 2000.
298 Simon Tormey 28. Agnes Heller, ‘The Contingent Person and the Existential Choice’, Philosophical Forum 1–2, Fall-Winter 1989–90, 62. 29. Heller, Philosophy of History in Fragments (note 8), p. 59. 30. Thus as she puts it ‘radical tolerance’ implies an active rather than passive relation to the other which presupposes a ‘caring relation’, not indifference. See Agnes Heller and Ferenc Féher, ‘Citizen Ethics and Civic Virtues’, The Postmodern Political Condition (Cambridge, Polity, 1989) pp. 82–6.
15 ‘Not Dead Yet’: Marxism and Political Theory in the Era of Post-Communism Michael Levin
Marx before communism Political theory courses in British universities focus on a canon of thinkers among whom the following are conventionally assigned a place: Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke, Hegel, Marx and Mill. These writers, and a few others (e.g., Hume, Bentham, Tocqueville) have somehow become elevated out of the profusion of otherwise unnoticed or forgotten political writings of the long Western tradition of political reflection. The process by which the selection took place is, to say the least, obscure. Sheer quality is presumably an important factor, although in a number of cases a major theorist rose to prominence because his ideas fitted the political needs and circumstances of his time. Some thinkers enjoyed intellectual celebrity in their own lifetimes (Locke, Voltaire, Sartre and Rawls come to mind; Rousseau’s case is perhaps more one of notoriety); others are only given their laurels posthumously. How, then, does Marx fit in here? In mid-nineteenth century London it seems that most of the major literary and intellectual figures knew each other. Carlyle, for example, was acquainted with Coleridge, Dickens and Mill. None of them knew Marx. In 1869 Mill wrote some chapters for what remained an unfinished work on socialism. In it he suggested that ‘The clearest, the most compact, and the most precise and specific statement of the case of the Socialists generally against the existing order of society in the economical department of human affairs, is to be found in the little work of M. Louis Blanc, Organisation du Travail [1840]’.1 Marx was not mentioned here, nor elsewhere in Mill’s works. However, two years later, in 1871, Marx enjoyed some publicity as the presumed mastermind behind the Paris Commune. Then in the last 299
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decades of the century Marx and Engels’s ideas achieved prominence in the labour movements of various countries and thereby became known to a wider circle of intellectuals. For an ‘outsider’ estimate of Marx at the end of the century, let us take William Lecky’s prestigious twovolume work on Democracy and Liberty, published in 1896. Lecky did not seem to have liked Marx, describing him as ‘a frigid, systematic, pedantic, concentrated, arrogant thinker, working mainly through the press and by conspiracy, and, in conjunction with his chief disciple, Engels, he spent his life in elaborating a scheme of class warfare and universal spoliation, which has made many disciples’. He did not like Capital either, and was relieved to note that It is not probable that a work so long, so obscure, confused, and tortuous in its meanings, and so unspeakably dreary in its style, has had many readers among the working classes, or indeed in any class: but the mere fact that a highly pretentious philosophical treatise, with a great parade of learning, and continually expressing the most arrogant contempt for the most illustrious economical and historical writers of the century, should have been written in defence of plunder and revolution, has, no doubt, not been without its effect. Such asides apart, Lecky gave a serious, lengthy and knowledgeable account, concluding that ‘The doctrine of Marx is, in its essentials, the received and recognized doctrine of the great body, not only of German, but of French socialists’. It was however never ‘likely to take deep root in English soil’.2 A year later, 1897, it is noteworthy that Marx, at some length, and Engels, very briefly, made it into Chambers’s Biographical Dictionary. It is interesting how flattering are the references to Marx. The dictionary noted Marx’s ‘marvellous knowledge of economic literature and of the economic development of modern Europe. . . . Marx was a man of extraordinary knowledge, which he handled with masterly skill. Incomparably more than any other man he has influenced the labour movement all over the civilized world’. However, the influence Marxist ideas had on the nascent German Social Democratic Party through the 1871 Erfurt Programme was not matched in Britain. An invaluable survey of the formative ideas of the first Labour MPs makes it clear that Ruskin, Carlyle, Sir Walter Scott and the Bible all figured more prominently than the founding fathers of ‘scientific socialism’.3 It seems, then, that around the turn of the century, even in Britain, Marx’s ideas were recognized as significant, but more on account of their
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influence on continental labour movements than because of their intrinsic intellectual merits.
Marx in the age of communism The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and then the spread of communism into China and Eastern Europe after the Second World War made Marx seem more important than ever before. The Cold War was, and thankfully remained, mainly a war of ideas, and the ideas of the ‘other side’ derived from Marx. Rightly or wrongly Marx was tied to communism. Russian communism declared itself not merely the natural leader of all workingclass political movements but simultaneously the sole legitimate guardian and interpreter of Marxism. This need not surprise us. What is more interesting was that, perhaps unconsciously, most people in the west accepted the latter claim. People who would not have trusted a Communist to tell them the way to the post office accepted as accurate the Soviet presentation of Marx. The identification of the Soviet Union with Marx meant that whatever some people disliked about the former could be attributed to the latter. One consequence was a memorable letter to the Radio Times complaining of a programme on ‘Karl Marx in London’, which gave some prominence to the various public houses where Marx had joined his émigré compatriots in fraternal revelry. However an outraged viewer wrote to express ‘utter astonishment at the content . . . the fact that Karl Marx was one of the most evil men that ever lived was not mentioned’.4 This was an instance of the extraordinary fact that many people, of all political persuasions but united only in their ignorance of the writings involved, presumed to pontificate with absolute certainty as to what Marxism ‘really’ was. Ordinary members of the public, who would never have dreamt of voicing an opinion on Hume, Burke or Mill, felt blithely unconstrained in presenting forthright views on Marx. And how did they know about Marx? Because they knew, or assumed they knew, about ‘his’ Soviet Union. This situation gave unwarranted credence to the Soviet version of Marxism, but nevertheless the Cold War years (or more precisely from the 1960s onwards)5 were a high-point for Marx studies. Firstly, this was because Marxist ideas were linked to practical politics. From the dominant western standpoint the ideas of the enemy had to be understood. During this time E. P. Thompson could describe Marxism as one of the most universal languages of mankind, neglect of which indicated an indefensible parochialism.6 A third of the world’s population then lived
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under political regimes that declared themselves Marxist; and elsewhere powerful political groupings identified with his name. Where, by contrast, was the Tocqueville Party of All India or the Mill-ite faction in Brazil? Also, from the 1960s there was a rapid expansion of the social sciences, which provided a base from which serious discussion of Marx could take place. It had long been declared ‘almost impossible to find a communist in a communist country’7 yet in the capitalist world the Marx industry maintained a growth rate that put other Western businesses to shame. In 1983 Tom Bottomore noted that ‘Marxist ideas have now regained or acquired for the first time, an important place in all the social sciences’.8 In one sense, cold war ideology did little damage in that brands of western Marxism were developed without deference to the Soviet version. On the other hand, the cold war context meant that the study of Marxist and socialist ideas took place in a constricting and heightened emotional atmosphere. Even within academia Marx scholars sometimes had to fight for breathing space between those who suspected that they might be Marxist and those who were suspicious that they might not be. I personally found it all much easier when I was working on Rousseau. Nobody enquired or cared as to whether I was a pro-Rousseau or an anti-Rousseau. It might have been rather different two hundred years earlier but time had rendered Rousseau’s eloquence less inflammatory. I was not prepared to wait for time to do the same to Marx and accepted that those who venture into the kitchen risk getting burnt. Furthermore, Marxist ideas were granted significance not just because they formed the ideology of the Communist East but also because they were clearly relevant to the conditions of the capitalist, industrial West. Marxism, then, seemed to make sense of many aspects of industrial society. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the most important social questions concerned the condition and behaviour of the working class. To those in a higher position, it had long seemed worrying that the working class was so numerous. Not enough was known of them but much was feared. They lived in their own quarters, cut off from ‘improving’ contact with their ‘betters’. What would happen if they were given the vote? What would happen if they were not? Were they fit enough to fight and die for their country? Were they working hard enough? Were their trade unions too strong? Could their political party safely be entrusted with government? It seemed that in a democracy the politics of its largest class was crucial for the society as a whole. So even if communism seemed implausible, evil and alien,
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close attention to the working class seemed essential and on that score debate with Marxism was necessary. One way or another the working class was of immense concern and a social theory which put them at the centre of its analysis, whether one accepted it or not, was at least situated where it mattered.
Marx after communism This century has been the century of Marxism because it has been the century of Russian communism. But now the ‘short’ twentieth century has ended in the same way that the eighteenth century ended in 1789. Hobsbawm’s ‘Age of Extremes’ is over.9 As to what age succeeds it, we don’t know even though we already live within its span. (I’d put my money on Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ before Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’, although it makes more sense to keep entirely clear of the betting-shop.) Communism as a movement is widely taken to be finished. Something that uses its name is still operative in China and parts of Southeast Asia, but, we may assume, its appeal has been extinguished both in the so-called western world and, by and large, in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. What I intend to consider here is the extent to which Marxism and communism can be separated. There was Marxism before communism, but that provides no guide for the prospects of Marxism after communism. In the earlier situation hope for practical implementation still existed. Marxism seemed to be not just an academic social science but, simultaneously, a vision of a desirable and plausible future. If Marxism is still to be relevant it now has to exist without that prospect. In addition to the end of communism, the wider underpinnings of Marxist studies have been eroded by post-industrialism and the reduced significance of the industrial working class. According to J. K. Galbraith’s The Culture of Contentment10 the working class vote matters less than before and the key political battle is that of winning middle-class support. Thus we have witnessed a delegitimization of class discourse and collective representations and an upranking of individualism, consumerism and life-style concerns. This change has found its way into academia. Sociology departments, once the heart of the university left subculture, have now shifted their attention from Marxism, classical theory and the empirical study of society to postmodernism, the media and culture. Indications of this change are all around us. Compare, for example,
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the type and content of the second-hand bookshops on London’s Charing Cross Road now and ten years ago. Collet’s has gone and so too has the quantity of books on Marxism and communism in the shops that remain. Note also that some left-wing publications seem to have lost their nerve. The New Left Review and The Socialist Register (despite the 1998 Manifesto anniversary issue) hardly deal any more with Marx. Compare their article titles of the 1990s with those of the previous decades. They may perhaps be applying Marx’s method to current conditions (I leave you to judge) but it is quite clear that the continued study of Marx and Engels themselves is off the agenda. Meanwhile Living Marxism cunningly disguises itself as LM! Marxist studies, then, were part of a superstructure that had as their supporting base the existence of Soviet-style communism in the east and a large, organized working class with their relatively radical political parties in the West. Marxisms, of course, have come in many varieties. For the moment we might oversimplify this into two broad categories, that of eastern Marxism, which was the ideology of a regime, and the western Marxisms, which were, on the whole, part of academic social science. Eastern Marxism changed the world; western Marxism tried to understand it. Eastern Marxism has gone; what, then, of western Marxism? Can Marxism have a future when communism only has a past? Marxism has been forced back from the Politburo to the seminar room; from practice to theory. This is a severe blow to its aspirations, for in its selfpresentation Marxism claimed to be a synthesis of theory and practice; it was a science of society and also the political weapon of a class. It emerged from the academy but was not to be confined there. Its declared destiny was to connect with the largest and most exploited class of modern capitalism, the industrial proletariat. It was their theory in the sense that it attached itself to them. It claimed to belong to them. It did not, however, derive from them. In the words of Rudolf Bahro, ‘The workers – individual exceptions apart – were never Marxist in the strict sense. Marxism is a theory based on the existence of the working class, but it is not the theory of the working class. It was always Left intellectuals who found themselves in a position to understand Marxism as a whole’.11 In the same spirit, Alvin Gouldner has been one of the most illuminating guides to how Marxism attempted to hide its origins. He saw Marxism as the theory of the dissident bourgeoisie, of intellectuals ashamed of their social position and, out of humanitarianism, attached
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to those whom society rewards least. In the age of science Marxism felt compelled to disguise its humanitarianism and claim to represent the findings of dispassionate analysis. Gouldner’s sociology of Marxism reveals a social location and an ethic both of which were an embarrassment to its foremost proponents.12 Marxism, then, has lost communism and never seriously connected with the mass of the working class. For some this is a fatal, or at least near-fatal, blow to the doctrine itself. In R. N. Berki’s view, ‘Marx’s critique of capitalism has no sense whatever in the absence of his fundamental belief in communism’.13 Perry Anderson first argued and then (in the ‘Afterword’) denied that ‘Marxist theory . . . acquires its proper contours only in direct relation to a mass revolutionary movement’.14 So does Marxism go down with the ship? On some accounts it does. Ralf Dahrendorf has been pleased to declare that ‘Marx is dead . . . Marx’s teaching has come to grief in 1989, if not long before’.15 David Cannadine has observed a reverse domino effect: ‘The collapse of communism has discredited Marx, which has in turn discredited socialism, which has in turn discredited class’.16 The end, or obsolescence of Marxism, is, of course, an old theme, found, among many others, in Eduard Bernstein in 1899 through to Karl Popper in the 1940s and Anthony Crosland in the 1950s.17 The common charge was that capitalism had changed its form since Marx developed his analysis so that his conclusions were no longer applicable. A capitalism based on trusts and cartels was less likely to collapse from internal causes than one still dominated by unregulated laissez-faire. The alleged irrelevance of Marxism, however, has not been without its compensations. Both the study of Marx and Engels themselves and the social scientific use of Marxism have suffered through their association with political tyrannies. Several writers on Marxism have voiced the sense of liberation they now feel.18 This new situation has enabled Marx to be appreciated on his own merits and to penetrate parts of our culture that he never reached before. For example, The New Yorker and the London Evening Standard are not traditional bastions of left-wing thinking. Yet in the former we find italicized and in a prominent position the statement that ‘Marx’s view of free enterprise is now being echoed by many businessmen who would rather be flogged than labelled Marxists’, and as a concluding sentence, ‘His books will be worth reading as long as capitalism endures’.19 And in the Evening Standard of 8 May 1998, A. N. Wilson commented on the
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three publications marking the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto: ‘Some voices of protest have been raised, and my friend Simon Heffer has even opined that to celebrate the publication of this work is on a moral level with celebrating Hitler’s Mein Kampf’. However Wilson rejected the parallel, noting that Marx was a great literary genius . . . The Communist Manifesto, urgent and astonishingly incisive, is one of the most brilliant political works ever penned . . . It is right to commemorate, even to honour, Marx, many of whose prophecies have turned out to be completely right, whatever we may be lulled into supposing at this particular moment of history. Perhaps with the demise of communism we are left with a Marx who will not frighten people. This Marx can be granted an honourable place in the history of ideas and in the origins of the social sciences. In that sense he is no more ‘finished’ than Durkheim, Weber, or Tocqueville are finished. George Lichtheim once declared that ‘all attempts to discuss Marxism in a morally neutral atmosphere are from the start condemned to failure’.20 Such a forthright conclusion makes less sense now. Marx studies can at last be freed from a Cold War atmosphere and, in William Booth’s words, ‘in the calm of the political passions, the study of Marx could join that of Aristotle, or Plato: dispassionate and at a certain remove from his political fate and the hopes and fears that it stirred’.21 In this situation Marx will no more disappear than Hegel, Tocqueville, Mill, Weber and Durkheim have disappeared. It is revealing to note that those who amalgamate the end of communism with the end of Marx do not demand the obliteration of other major thinkers because core elements of their thought seem implausible. Do we curtail Hegel studies through rejection of his theory of the world spirit and the disappearance of the Prussian state, or declare Tocqueville irrelevant because of his unfashionable theory of providence? Such thinkers remain within the culture of scholarship and so will Marx, whose position there is particularly substantial. In the words of Graham McCann: Marx, like Freud, has entered the texture of modern thought, his words and ideas have insinuated themselves too deeply into our culture for anyone to escape their influence. An extraordinary range of disciplines – political theory, sociology, anthropology, history, political economy, literary criticism, cultural studies, law, philosophy – reflect the exceptional impact of Marx’s contribution.22
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This is praise indeed but for Marxists still not enough, for Marxism prided itself on the unity of theory and practice. At this stage, however, it is clear that Marxism’s predictive claims were part of its theology. The evidence of the last century and a half is that Marxism cannot tell us what will happen next and its chosen agency of transformation has not and cannot now be expected to perform the role ascribed to it. However, relief at the irrelevance of Marxism may well be premature. One current argument is that the end of communism has produced a global economy that is more capitalist than before. It has, in some senses, brought us nearer to the type of society Marx described, so that his analysis is now even more applicable to our current situation. John Gray of LSE has noted that The fall of Communism destroyed Marxian socialism as a political project. At the same time, it gave Marx’s analysis of capitalism a new lease on life . . . The managed capitalism of the post-war period has given way to a more volatile and predatory variety. As a result, what long seemed most anachronistic in The Communist Manifesto now looks prophetic . . . partly as a result of the implosion of Marxian socialism, Marx’s view of capitalism has been in some crucial respects vindicated . . . This contradiction – between liberal values and real life in market societies – is the enduring truth contained in The Communist Manifesto.23 In one of the first analyses of the post-Communist situation Alex Callinicos noted that Marx made ‘three main claims against the market economy: that it gives rise to exploitation, that it is anarchic, and that it makes human beings unfree. The middle claim, capitalism as anarchic, is the one that has long been contested on the left by the likes of Eduard Bernstein and Karl Renner. However their point seems less conclusive in the wake of the collapse of the East Asian economies’. Callinicos concludes that Marx’s critique ‘retains all its force’.24 Marxism began with the analysis of capitalist societies. It may legitimately continue in the same way. This will not de-radicalize Marxism, for a basic political need of our time is to challenge the dominance of the market and in this endeavour it is likely that the west’s supreme critic of market hegemony will still be found illuminating. Marxism, then, will always be more than just a social science. The theory will not sink into neutrality both because it will still be associated with its own history and also because it will retain its cutting-edge, as the following concluding points are intended to indicate.
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What can Marxism still offer the social sciences? I would initially suggest the following: (i)
The centrality of class and the economic. The erosion and fragmentation of the working class undermines Marx’s faith in them as the agents of social transformation, but Marx’s method (rather than his political proposals) was not fundamentally about the working class but about class as such. The industrial working class were just one instance. Their reduced power does not signify the end of class society. We have seen, for many interesting reasons, the decline of the language of class but in societies where inequalities have increased, I would doubt that the thing itself has disappeared. I suspect that the delegitimization of the language of class is in itself a class ploy, for thereby the worst-off are denied the conceptual tools to understand their situation. Marxism, then, can demystify the present and suggest how values relate to material interests and ownership to exploitation. Furthermore, Marx’s theory of class stratification was not developed just to show how many diverse parts society had, but, more centrally, to demonstrate how they interrelated to form one whole. Liberalism had fragmented society into its constituent sections. Postmodernism, as Ellen Wood has noted, continues this disaggregation. The Marxist task, in the spirit of Hegel’s dictum that ‘The truth is the whole’, is to demonstrate ‘the systemic unity of capitalism’.25 (ii) Marx’s historical sense helps us see the present in a long-term perspective. His theory was not just one of how the parts of society connect into a single totality but also of their inherent dynamic. Neither slavery nor feudalism lasted for ever. There is no reason to think that capitalism will. Alex Callinicos asks of it, ‘Is this really the best that humankind can do? Can a species with an astonishing history of technical and social innovations packed into a few millennia really accept the market as the nec plus ultra [nothing further] of its development?’26 (iii) Though Marxism cannot outline a blueprint of what is inevitable it can still provide a vision of a society more in accord with the highest human ideals. Marx and Engels decried utopias for their deficient theories of transition. The so-called Utopian Socialists were held to have an inadequate understanding both of the material basis of communism and of the agency destined to achieve it. Marx and Engels elevated their own ‘science’ above their rivals’ utopias. Even for those who regard the ‘science’ as discredited, there
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is still some value in the utopia. Following Mrs Thatcher’s TINA in the 1980s (‘There Is No Alternative’), we have Fukuyama’s End of History for the ’90s. In both cases a closure is put on alternative futures. Against this it is imperative to say that the current world order is not the final achievement of humanity’s aspirations. William Booth has noted ‘a pervasive anti-utopianism, arising from a sense of the exhaustion of the grand projects associated with the European Enlightenment’.27 In this situation Marcuse’s point on the importance of utopia in combating one-dimensionality has renewed importance and relevance. The vision of communism, then, may still be valuable even if we don’t know when, how or even if it might be attainable. It still functions both as a stick with which capitalist society can be beaten and as a ruler with which its limited stature can be measured.28 (iv) We have noted the view that the post-Communist global economy has made Marx more relevant. This is a paradoxical windfall for Marx studies. However, Marx’s method is not dependent on the globe being capitalist in some approximation to what he once described. Marxism as a mode of analysis examines the relationship between ownership, power and social change and thus can illuminate a wider variety of social formations than whatever happens to be dominant at this moment.29
Notes 1. S. Collini (ed.), John Stuart Mill. On Liberty and other writings (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989) p. 234. 2. W. E. H. Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, 2 vols (London, Longman, 1896) vol. 2, pp. 238–9, 256, 260–1. 3. See W. H. Stead, ‘The Labour Party and the Books that helped to make it’, Review of Reviews, 1906, 568–82. 4. Radio Times, 24–30 July 1982. 5. ‘The 1960s saw . . . a breakthrough for Marxism, which was taken seriously as an intellectual current for the first time’. A. Arblaster, ‘The Death of Socialism – Again’, Political Quarterly 62/1, Jan.–March 1991, 45–51, 45. In similar vein, see also A. Callinicos, The Revenge of History. Marxism and the East European Revolutions (Cambridge, Polity, 1991) p. 1; and J. Hoffman, ‘Has Marxism a Future?’, Leicester University Discussion Papers in Politics, No. P91/1, Sept. 1991, p. 17. 6. E. P. Thompson, ‘The acceptable faces of Marxism’, The Observer, 4 Feb. 1979. 7. Bryan Magee MP in The Times, 13 Oct. 1975. 8. T. Bottomore, ‘Sociology’, in D. McLellan (ed.), Marx: The first hundred years (Oxford, 1983) p. 125. 9. See E. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century. 1914 –1991 (London, Michael Joseph, 1994).
310 Michael Levin 10. J. K. Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1993). 11. R. Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe (London, New Left Books, 1978) p. 197. 12. See A. W. Gouldner, Against Fragmentation. The Origin of Marxism and the Sociology of the Intellectuals (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985). 13. R. N. Berki, Insight and Vision. The Problem of Communism in Marx’s Thought (London, Dent, 1983) p. 8 and see p. 95. 14. P. Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London, Verso, 1979) p. 109. 15. R. Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (London, Chatto & Windus, 1990) pp. 30, 26. 16. The Times Higher Education Supplement, 30 Dec. 1994. 17. See E. Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993); K. R. Popper: ‘. . . unrestrained capitalism [gave] way to an economic interventionism. The economic system described and criticized by Marx has everywhere ceased to exist’. The Open Society and its Enemies (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963) vol. 2, p. 125. And on the end of socialism, see the observations of V. Geoghegan, ‘Has Socialism a Future?’, Journal of Political Ideologies 1/3, 1966, 261–75, 262–3. 18. For example, Terrell Carver, ‘There is a great deal of relief in the world of Marxism . . . discussions of Marx have a freedom they have lacked since 1917’. Quoted in H. Richards, ‘Marx is dead. Long live Marxism’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 12 March 1993, p. 48. Also see A. Arblaster, ‘The Death of Socialism – Again’ (note 5), p. 49. 19. John Cassidy, ‘The Next Thinker. The Return of Karl Marx’, The New Yorker, 20 and 27 Oct. 1997, pp. 248, 259. 20. G. Lichtheim, Marxism (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974) p. xviii. 21. W. J. Booth, ‘Marx after 1989’, Political Theory 23/3, Aug. 1995, 527–41, 530. 22. Graham McCann, ‘Off your Marx?’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 29 April 1994, p. 15. 23. John Gray, ‘Hollow Triumph. Why Marx still provides a potent critique of the contradictions of late modern capitalism’, Times Literary Supplement, 8 May 1998, pp. 3–4. This is an interesting change of tone from the John Gray of Oxford University who nine years earlier (24 Feb.–2 March 1989) and in the same journal wrote on American Marxism under the heading ‘Fashion, fantasy or fiasco?’, reprinted a few years later as ‘The Academic Romance of Marxism’, in Post-Liberalism. Studies in Political Thought (London, Routledge, 1993) ch. 9. Also see J. D. White, Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1996) p. 367. 24. Callinicos, The Revenge of History (note 5), p. 100. 25. E. M. Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism. Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995) p. 238. 26. Ibid. p. 133. 27. Booth, ‘Marx after 1989’ (note 21), p. 529. 28. For a fuller discussion of this issue, see M. Levin, ‘On the Adequacy of Marx’s Vision of Communism’, Praxis International 3/4, Jan. 1984, 335–47. 29. One could additionally discuss the continued value and relevance of Marxistbased theories of alienation and imperialism, for which space is not available here.
Index Note: There are no subject entries for Marx, Karl or for Marxism as these would cover most of the book. Look instead for titles of Marx’s works or for topics such as ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Abbott, Pamela, 225, 226 Abrams, P., 131 actually existing socialism, i.e. Communism, 2, 78, 80, 82, 261 Adorno, Theodor, 104, 260 After Virtue (MacIntyre), 9, 75, 76, 80, 81, 82, 84, 87 alienated labour, 65 alienation, 9, 55, 59, 60, 62, 63, 68, 75, 79, 86, 222, 258, 292 Allen, J., 76, 127 Allende, Salvador, 17, 290 Althusser, Louis, 77, 89, 265 altruism, 8, 37, 38, 39 Anderson, Perry, 199, 271, 305 androgyny, 231 Anti-Dühring (Engels), 77 Arendt, Hannah, 214, 215 Aristotle, 8, 9, 10, 20, 60, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 84, 85, 86, 90, 109, 112, 293, 299, 306 Aronowitz, Stanley, 14, 200, 271 Art of Loving, The (Fromm), 55 Atlantic Fordism, 120, 135 authoritarian character, 59 automation, 239, 240 autonomy (of autopoietic systems), 132 autonomy (of market), 112 autonomy (of persons), 8, 12, 31, 32, 34, 41, 42, 46, 50, 90, 110, 147, 156, 226, 268, 269, 274, 281, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 291, 292, 293 autonomy (of state), 11, 120, 123, 128, 132, 134, 136, 137, 158 autonomy (of states), 11 autopoietic theory of state, 132, 133
Babeuf, Graccus, 202 Badie, B., 134 Bahro, Rudolf, 304 Baudrillard, Jean, 258, 266, 267 Bauer, Bruno, 205 Bauer, Otto, 281 Bauman, Z., 262 Benson, Herman, 208 Bentham, Jeremy, 60, 299 Benton, Ted, 236 Berki, Robert N., 305 Berlin, Isaiah, 291 Bernstein, Eduard, 202, 305, 307 Best, S., 266, 271 Beyond Justice (Heller), 285 Bialecki, I., 167, 174 Big Man societies, 34 Birnbaum, B., 134 Blair, Tony, 2, 20, 29 Blanc, Louis, 299 Organisation du Travail, 299 Blanqui, Auguste, 202, 205 Blood Transfusion Service, 38, 39, 40 Bobbio, Norberto, 202 Bonapartism, 14, 209, 210, 211 Booth, William, 306, 309 Bottomore, Tom, 302 boundary problem, 42, 43 Brown, W., 127 Brownmiller, Susan, 230 Femininity, 230 Brudney, Daniel, 76, 77, 79, 82, 88, 91 Bubley, Esther, 231 Buchanan, James, 76 Budapest School, 284 budget maximizing, 152 Bukharin, Nikolai, 21, 192, 208 Buonarroti, Filippo, 202 Burke, Edmund, 299, 301 311
312 Index Callinicos, Alex, 23, 162, 267, 273, 307, 308, 310 Calvin, Jean, 60 Camus, Albert, 217 Cannadine, David, 305 Capital (Marx), 3, 60, 202, 281, 300 capital logic state theory, 120 Carlyle, Thomas, 215, 299, 300 Carnoy, Martin, 154 Carter, Joseph, 209, 210, 211 Carver, Terrell, 20 central planning, 29, 49 Chase-Dunn, Christopher, 162 Chile, 17, 290 civil society (Habermas), 111 class, Marx’s theory of, 308 Clinton, Bill, 2, 20 Cloud, D., 268 Cohen, G. (also known as Jerry Cohen), 13, 29, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 46, 162, 243, 244, 245, 246, 248, 249, 250 Coleridge, Thomas, 299 Collingwood, Robin G., 286 Comintern, 21, 119, 212 commodity fetishism, 59, 62, 63 Communist League, 259 Communist Party, 80, 189, 192, 266 community, 8, 30, 41, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 50, 61, 68, 76, 85, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 110, 124, 262, 270, 284, 287 Connell, Bob, 130, 228 Masculinities, 228 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A (Marx), 162, 242 Coward, Rosalind, 227 Sacred Cows, 227 Critical Theory, 21 Critique of the Gotha Programme (Marx), 46, 247 Crosland Anthony, 305 Cuba, 2, 262 Cultural Revolution, 34, 185 Culture of Contentment, The (Galbraith), 303
Dandeker, C., 126 de Ste Croix, G., 163 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 122 deformed workers’ state, 13 degenerate workers’ state, 186 Deleuze, Giles, 266 democracy, 1, 2, 5, 8, 14, 20, 30, 31, 41, 42, 43, 44, 50, 59, 65, 67, 109, 120, 129, 152, 161, 186, 189, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 211, 212, 214, 215, 216, 217, 221, 263, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274, 282, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 302 Democracy and Liberty (Lecky), 300 Deng Xiao Ping, 205 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 20, 265, 266 Spectres of Marx, 20 Dewey, John, 76, 111 Dews, P., 272 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer), 104 Dialectics of Nature, The (Engels), 77 Dickens, Charles, 299 dictatorship of the proletariat, 148, 157, 206, 207 Dictatorship of the Proletariat, The (Draper), 206 ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ from Marx to Lenin, The (Draper), 206 dictatorship over needs, 284 discourse analysis, 11, 122, 131 domestic labour, 222 Draper, Hal, 14, 15, 23, 163, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217 Dictatorship of the Proletariat, The, 206 ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ from Marx to Lenin, The, 206 Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, 200, 203, 206, 212 Durkheim, Emile, 34, 107, 306 Dworkin, Andrea, 224 Dworkin, Ronald, 47
Dahrendorf, Ralf, 305, 310 Daly, Mary, 229
Eastern Europe, 13, 161, 164, 165, 168, 173, 175, 286, 301, 303, 310
Index Ecology, 251 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx), 8, 57, 62, 281 economic determinism, 12 efficiency, 8, 16, 48, 67, 149, 240, 241, 247 Elster, John, 18, 37 Engels, Friedrich E., 21, 74, 77, 80, 119, 148, 152, 153, 163, 205, 206, 207, 212, 213, 222, 223, 243, 247, 259, 300, 304, 305, 308 Anti-Dühring, 77 Dialectics of Nature, The, 77 German Ideology, The, 77, 79, 82, 89, 90, 247 Holy Family, The, 61 Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1, 3, 153, 243, 244, 275, 259, 304, 306, 307 Enlightenment Project, 4, 5 equality, 8, 17, 30, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 150, 156, 205, 226, 233, 272, 284, 285, 291, 293, 294, 295 Erfurt Programme, 1895, 207, 300 ethics, Aristotelian, 8 Eurocommunism, 1, 260 Everyday Life (Heller), 281 Factory Acts, 152, 153 Faktizität und Geltung (Habermas), 109, 111, 112 Fear of Freedom, The (Fromm), 57, 58, 59 femininities, 15, 223, 228, 230, 231, 232, 233 Femininity (Brownmiller), 230 feminism, 5, 9, 11, 15, 16, 23, 64, 119, 121, 122, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 136, 137, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 227, 228, 232, 258, 264 Marxist, 15, 23, 222 radical feminism, 128 fettering, 243, 244, 245, 246 table, 244 feudalism, 164 First International, 1 Forgacs, D., 270
313
Foucault, Michel, 11, 21, 122, 125, 126, 127, 137, 265, 266 Fourth International, 22, 189 Frank, Andre G., 165 Frankel, B., 268 Frankfurt School, 9, 56, 57, 59, 97, 120, 188 Fraser, Nancy, 266 Free Speech Movement, 215 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 57, 76, 80, 306 Friedman, Milton, 150, 151 Fromm, Erich, 8, 9, 23, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 76, 77, 78, 80 Art of Loving, The, 55 Fear of Freedom, The, 57, 58, 59 Man For Himself, 57, 59, 61, 75 Marx’s Concept of Man, 62 Sane Society, The, 59, 67 To Have or To Be?, 55, 61, 67 Fukuyama, Francis, 303, 309 Galbraith John K., 303 Culture of Contentment, The, 303 Gandy, Ross, 214 Geras, Norman, 205, 259, 262, 267, 271, 273, 280, 291 German Ideology, The (Marx and Engels), 77, 79, 82, 89, 90, 247 Giddens, Anthony, 126, 265 Gierek, Eduard, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172 globalization, 11, 68, 69, 133, 134, 193, 258 Gomulka, Wladyslaw, 168, 169 good life (Habermas), 113 Gorbachev, Nikolai, 175, 187 Gould, Carol, 75, 77, 90 Gouldner, Alvin, 304, 305 governmentality, 11, 122, 126, 127 Gramsci, Antonio, 19, 21, 89, 121, 122, 188, 260, 275 grand narratives, 3, 4, 260, 273, 292 Gray, John, 31, 151, 156, 307 Green politics, 16 Grossman, Vasily, 200 growth of needs, 250 Guaranteed Income, 9, 66 Guattari, Felix, 266
314 Index Habermas, Jurgen, 9, 10, 21, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 272 Faktizität und Geltung, 109, 111, 112 Theory and Practice, 98, 106, 257 Theory of Communicative Action, 10, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110 Hall, Stuart, 19, 268, 310 Harman, Chris, 162 Hayek, Friedrich, 293 Heffer, Simon, 306 Hegel, Georg W. F., 7, 18, 62, 75, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 111, 184, 272, 299, 306, 308 Hegelian Marxism, 21 hegemonic masculinity, 228, 233 hegemony, 269 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe), 258, 269, 280, 294 Heidegger, Martin, 265 Heidelburg Aesthetics (Lukács), 281 Held, David, 12, 147, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158 Heller, Agnes, 17, 23, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295 Beyond Justice, 285 Everyday Life, 281 Philosophy of Morals, The, 285 Renaissance Man, 281 Theory of History, A, 282, 286 Theory of Needs in Marx, A, 281 higher phase of communist society, 247 Hirst, Paul Q., 265 History and Class Consciousness (Lukács), 281 History of the Russian Revolution (Trotsky), 183 Hitler, Adolf, 189, 195, 306 Mein Kampf, 306 Ho Chin Minh, 288 Hobbes, Thomas, 99, 299 Hobsbawm, Eric, 195, 303 Hodges, Donald, 214 Hoffman, John, 147 Holy Family, The (Marx and Engels), 61
Hook, Sidney, 186, 187 hooks, bell, 222, 229 Horkheimer, Max, 97, 98, 104, 260 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 104 Horney, Karen, 57 Hornsby, Jennifer, 44 human essence, 8, 60, 63, 77, 281 human relations management, 67 Hume, David, 76, 299, 301 Husserl, Edmund, 265 International Socialists, 80 Jacobson, Julie, 216, 217 Jacques, Martin, 268 Jameson, Frederick, 266 Jaroszewicz, Piotr, 172 Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 173 Jarvie, I. C., 241, 248 Kania, Stanislaw, 172, 173 Kant, Immanuel, 60, 76, 77, 93, 105 Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (Draper), 200, 203, 206, 212 Katz, C., 163 Kautsky, Karl, 74, 77, 87 Kellner, D., 266, 271 Kennedy, M. D., 167, 174 Khruschev, Nikita, 1, 262 Kierkegaard, Soren, 292 Knowledge and Human Interests (Habermas), 102, 103 Kohl, Helmut, 3, 261 Kolankiewicz, K. Z., 170 Kolm, Serge-Christophe, 47 KOR (Workers’ Defence Committee), 171 Korsch, Karl, 188 labour power, 86, 150, 153, 236, 238, 240 Laclau, Ernesto, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 257, 258, 259, 260, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 268, 269, 270, 273, 280, 281, 287, 288, 294 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 258, 269, 280, 294 laissez-faire, 151, 305 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 202
Index Lecky, William, 300 Democracy and Liberty, 300 Left Opposition, 21 Lenin, Vladimir Illich, 21, 65, 74, 77, 87, 91, 184, 187, 189, 207, 208, 260, 266, 281 Leninism, 1, 21, 74 Levine, A., 19, 249 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 265 liberalism, 4, 12, 13, 30, 74, 77, 80, 81, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 216, 261, 268, 269, 291 Lichtheim, George, 306 lifeworld, 10, 105, 107, 108 Living Marxism (LM), 304 Lloyd, Genevieve, 130 Lobkowicz, Nicholas, 89, 90 Locke, John, 290, 299 Lorde, Audre, 229 Lukács, Georg, 21, 100, 101, 281 Heidelburg Aesthetics, 281 History and Class Consciousness, 281 Luther, Martin, 60 Luxemburg, Rosa, 21, 260, 281, 288 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 16, 258, 265, 266, 267, 273 Maccoby, Michael, 64 Macdonald, Oliver, 199 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 122, 299 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 9, 60, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93 After Virtue, 9, 75, 76, 80, 81, 82, 84, 87 MacKinnon, Catharine A., 127, 224 Making of the English Working Class, The (Thompson), 92 Man For Himself (Fromm), 57, 59, 61, 75 Mandel, Ernest, 22, 183, 190, 193 Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels), 1, 3, 153, 243, 244, 275, 259, 304, 306, 307 Mao, Tse Tung, 74, 192, 205 Marcuse, Herbert, 57, 59, 80, 215, 216, 260, 309 markets (Habermas’s concept), 108
315
Marx, Karl Capital, 3, 60, 202, 281, 300 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A, 162, 242 Critique of the Gotha Programme, 46, 247 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 8, 57, 62, 281 German Ideology, The, 77, 79, 82, 89, 90, 247 Holy Family, The, 61 Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1, 3, 153, 243, 244, 275, 259, 304, 306, 307 Theses on Feuerbach, 82, 84, 88, 89, 90, 93, 206 Marx’s Concept of Man (Fromm), 62 Marxist feminism, problems of, 222 masculinities, 223, 228, 232 Masculinities (Connell), 228 Matgamna, Sean, 210 Mayo, Elton, 67 McCann, Graham, 306 McCarney, Joseph, 21 McLennan, Gregor, 199, 217, 272, 273 means of production, 14, 16, 78, 91, 150, 165, 166, 169, 199, 200, 236 Meikle, Scott, 75, 78, 83, 90 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 306 Melossi, D., 131 meritocracy, 47 Merleau-Ponty, 265 methodological individualism, 149 micro-physics of power, 122, 125, 137 Miliband, Ralph, 158, 273 Mill, John Stuart, 151, 291, 299, 301, 302, 306 Miller, M., 265 Miller, Richard W., 155 Mitchell, T., 125 Mitterand, François, 3, 261 modernization (Habermas), 102, 104 modernization, industrial, 169 Molyneux, John, 21 Mouffe, Chantal, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 257, 258, 259, 260, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 268, 269, 270, 273, 280, 281, 287, 288, 294
316 Index Mouffe, Chantal – continued Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 258, 269, 280, 294 Mouzelis, N., 271 National Liberation, 193 neo-statism, 122, 123, 124, 125, 133 New Labour, 29, 30, 310 New Left, 20, 64, 214, 215, 310 New Left Review, 304 New Right, 2, 20, 274 new social movements, 3, 6, 7, 69, 280 Nicholson, Ann, 266 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 81, 89, 90 nomenklatura, 13, 166, 167, 168, 169, 172, 174, 175, 176 Northern Ireland, 43 Nozick, Robert, 293 Olszowski, Stefan, 172 One Member One Vote (OMOV), 44 One Member, One Voice, 44 Organisation du Travail (Blanc), 299 Owen, 202 Owen, Robert, 91 paedophilia, 31, 32 Pannekoek, A., 288 Parsons, Talcott, 108 patriarchy, 128, 129, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 233 permanent revolution, 13, 21, 183, 184, 193 Philosophy of Morals, The (Heller), 285 phronesis, 98, 109 planned economy, 165 Plato, 299, 306 Plekhanov, Georgi, 207, 208 Poland, 12, 13, 161, 162, 164, 167, 168, 170, 171, 173, 175, 176 Popper, Karl R., 305 post-Fordism, 11 post-Marxism, 3, 9, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 80, 89, 217, 257–76, 280, 281, 289, 294 definition, 260 postmodernism, 5, 13, 16, 20, 23, 81, 89, 121, 222, 258, 266, 267, 268, 273, 303
post-structuralism, 16, 20, 258, 263, 266, 269, 273 Poulantzas, Nicos, 275 practice as liberation (Habermas), 10, 99, 100, 102, 104, 108, 109 practice, MacIntyre’s concept of, 84 praxis, 9, 33, 85, 99, 101, 292 Preobrazhensky, Eugene, 187 productive forces, development of, 5, 16, 149, 162, 163, 167, 236, 238, 239, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250 fettering, 16, 162, 243, 245, 246, 247 proletariat, 274 Protestant ethic, 104 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 202 PUWP (Polish United Workers’ Party), 169, 172, 173, 174, 175 radical democracy, 5, 9, 17, 18, 64, 111, 257, 264, 265, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 280, 281, 289, 293 radical materialism, 16 Rakovsky, Christian, 187 rational choice Marxism, 7, 8, 76, 93 rationality, 9, 10, 61, 81, 85, 87, 97, 104, 105, 106, 109, 111, 130, 216, 248, 249, 266, 283, 290 Rawls, John, 47, 76, 93, 299 Reagan, Ronald, 261, 268, 310 Reaganism, 2 Rechtsstaat, 109, 110, 111 Reciprocity Four Forms, tabulated, 39 regulation approach, 121 relative autonomy, 12, 154, 158, 260, 281 Renaissance Man (Heller), 281 Renner, Karl, 307 revolution, Marx’s theory of, 162 Robotnik, 171 Roemer, 18, 45, 48, 49 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 18, 299, 302 Routley, Val, 239, 240 Ruskin, John, 215, 300 Russia, 13, 21, 183, 185, 187, 196, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 221
Index Sacred Cows (Coward), 227 Saint-Simon, Count Claude de, 202 Sane Society, The (Fromm), 59, 67 Sapsford, Roger, 225, 226 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 265, 299 Schaar, John, 57 Schroeder, Gerhard, 20 Scott, Walter, 300 Second International, 21, 119 Sejm (Polish Parliament), 174, 176 self-realization, 8, 30, 31, 32, 37, 49, 50, 59 Sen, Amartya, 45, 47 Shachtman, Max, 186, 210, 211 Sim, Stuart, 4, 258, 264, 267, 280 Sivanandan, A., 267, 268 Smith, Adam, 151 Sober, E., 19 social democracy, 1, 13, 16, 20, 65, 187, 189, 194, 195, 258, 261, 274 social exclusion, 6, 35 socialism from above (Hal Draper), 201, 202 socialism from below (Hal Draper), 201 socialism in one country, 183, 185, 188, 189, 192 Socialist Labour League, 80 socialist politics, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 68, 208 Socialist Register, 304 Solidarity, 13, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177 South African Communist Party, 188, 192 Spectres of Marx (Derrida), 20 Spinoza, Benedict, 60, 76 Stalin, Joseph, 1, 74, 185, 187, 188, 200, 208, 212 Stalinism, 14, 15, 21, 80, 87, 161, 194, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 208, 214, 215, 221, 262 state capitalism, 82, 120, 161, 162, 177, 190, 262 Stirner, Max, 89, 90 Sullivan, Harry S., 57
317
Taylor, Michael, 33, 35, 39 techne (Habermas), 99, 100 technological determinism, 162, 238 Thatcher, Margaret, 261, 268, 309, 310 Thatcherism, 2, 310 Theory and Practice (Habermas), 98, 106, 257 Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas), 10, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110 Theory of History, A (Heller), 282, 286 Theory of Needs in Marx, A (Heller), 281 Therborn, Goran, 275 Theses on Feuerbach (Marx), 82, 84, 88, 89, 90, 93, 206 Third Way, 2, 3, 20, 310 Thompson, Edward P., 92, 301 Making of the English Working Class, The, 92 Tit-for-Tat, 35, 39 Titmuss, Richard, 38, 39, 49 To Have or To Be? (Fromm), 55, 61, 67 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 205, 299, 302, 306 trade unions, 7, 67, 171, 194, 262, 302 traditions, MacIntyre’s theory of, 92 transitional epoch, 190 Trotsky, Lev Davidovich, 13, 14, 21, 74, 87, 88, 166, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 283 History of the Russian Revolution, 183 Trotskyism, 21, 183, 192, 193, 194, 195, 214 Utopian Socialists, 308 Velvet Revolutions, 2, 21 Verne, Jules, 64 violence domestic, 15, 222, 225, 233 sexual, 15, 225 Voltaire, F.-M.A. de, 299 Walby, Sylvia, 223, 224, 225, 228 Walesa, Lech, 173, 175 war-centred state theory, 124
318 Index Wasilewski, J., 164 Webb, Beatrice, 91 Webb, Sidney, 91 Weber, Max, 82, 104, 122, 306 welfare egalitarianism, 46 welfare state, 11, 29, 108, 151, 153 Wells, H. G., 216 Wilde, Lawrence, 75, 79, 80, 86, 87, 90 Wilson, Angus N., 305 withering away of state, 157
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 265 Wnuk-Lipinski, E., 164 Wood, Alan, 76 Wood, Ellen M., 163, 272, 308 workers’ participation, 67 world systems theory, 161, 162, 165, 177 WP-ISL (Workers Party – Independent Socialist League), 14, 200, 201, 214, 215, 217 Wright, E. O., 19, 249
