Matthew Johnson
Marx’s nineteenth-century thought provided the intellectual inspiration for a range of twentieth-century political movements and academic approaches, each with distinctive features and each, unfortunately, complicated by failings and contradictions. With the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, and the emergence of an economically reformed China, the events of the final years of the twentieth century seemed to have granted credence to Francis Fukuyama’s End of History thesis. At the same time, the academic left gravitated towards approaches which eschew ‘authoritarian’, ‘essentialist’ and ‘ethnocentric’ elements of orthodox Marxism. As a result, Marxism has seemed to be in danger of slipping from a method and subject of social scientific inquiry, to an object of historical intrigue or even indifference. Yet, given the nature and gravity of the events and issues of this new century, Marxism as both a political movement and an academic approach should be as relevant as ever.
In order to consider its relevance, we have to consider, first, the various ways in which Marxism since the time of Marx has been fractured and splintered and developed and evolved in various directions. There are several trajectories which are considered in this book. The first trajectory is the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein – the father of evolutionary socialism. For Bernstein, Marx’s empirical claims regarding the laws of historical development were confounded by the experiences of capitalism. The chances of achieving real socialist ends lay most prominently in the recognition of proletarian demands within the existing liberal democratic framework, with the attainment of rights a core goal of political praxis. The second trajectory is the autocratic vanguardism of Lenin, which, combined with his understanding of imperialism as the highest form of capitalism, laid the foundation for revolutionary action in the developing world. Lenin’s Bolshevism served to shift the attention of Marxism from the developed West to impoverished, developing regions of the world. This movement was strengthened by the emergence of Mao Zedong’s Sinicized Marxism, with its focus on agrarian relations of production and the revolutionary potential of peasants. The association between socialism, the developing world and anti-imperialism was firmly entrenched by the thought and praxis of guerrilla figures, such as Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh. From the protest movements of the 1960s onwards, various positions have emerged which have sought to incorporate external intellectual resources in order to revitalize the radical left. Some, such as Slavoj Žižek, have retained their Marxist identities, while rehabilitating Hegel and adopting elements of such figures as the psychoanalyst Jaque Lacan. The third trajectory, post-Marxism, differs both in content and identity. Post-Marxists have drawn intellectual inspiration from Marxism’s rejection of capital and retained elements of the thought of self-professed Marxists, such as Antonio Gramsci and Mao, while increasingly moved towards postmodern positions on essentialism, materialism, voluntarism, pluralism and democracy, as exemplified by Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s seminal Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
The revisions made by and within each of these trajectories have been in response to perceived deficits or oversights in classical and, subsequently, orthodox Marxism. These revisions have themselves, though, led to significant paradigmatic quandaries. Whether attempting to conserve, transcend or reject elements of Marx, those influenced by his work have to deal with the legacy of Marxism in light of several contemporary events.
Contemporary conflicts, challenges and developments
The beginning of the twentieth century saw significant confidence in neoliberalism, the Washington Consensus and the possibility of a truly integrated global economy. Some talked readily of the need for global governance as what were intended originally as trading blocs, such as the European Union, expanded and took increasingly political forms. While international economic institutions such as the WTO and IMF focused much of their attention on facilitating liberalization and privatization in developing countries, the most significant economic success stories appeared to emanate from states, such as China and India, which maintained substantive commitments to protectionism and public ownership. Those countries which appeared to have benefited from elements of neoliberal engagement with the global economy, such as Iceland and Ireland, found themselves at the heart of the late-2000s global financial crisis, having previously maintained that the rapid increases in real estate prices, which had brought dramatic growth, were both genuine and sustainable. Now, with those claims seriously undermined, the Washington Consensus has come to appear anything but consensual and neoliberalism as a project has been damaged, though certainly not defeated.
At a time when confidence in neoliberalism was perhaps at its height, the United States suffered the attacks on 11th September 2001. This marked the most dramatic incident in the campaign of Jihadist groups against Western targets and Western people as well as those in other parts of the world deemed to exist in contradiction to their theology or aims. The resulting campaigns waged by US-led coalitions against regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq marked the most brutal incidents in a decade of conflict in the Islamic world. Even now, with the stiflingly slow development of a broadly democratic system in Iraq and the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, these conflicts seem certain to continue, with their wider effects throughout the region and among migrant groups in Western countries unquantifiable. Alongside these conflicts, Western states continue to offer varying degrees of support to Israel, particularly in its confrontations with Hamas and Hezbollah, and have recently become involved militarily in the civil war in Libya.
One extremely significant development, in the context of ‘The War on Terror’ has been the invocation by liberal states of security imperatives to justify constraints on civil liberties. Autocratic or authoritarian societies, such as China and those currently being attacked or overthrown in the Middle East and North Africa, have often been criticized, by liberals in particular, for these actions on the basis that constraints served simply to ensure the stability and security of the regime against populaces whose interests were regarded as naturally antagonistic. However, the first decade of this century has seen steady encroachments on individual entitlements, among other things, to privacy, freedom of speech and freedom of movement. The actions taken by successive governments throughout the liberal world have, at times, appeared anything but liberal.
Now, with the most significant international proponents of the unconstrained market mired in conflict and debt, it would seem that the opportunity for Marxist contributions to debates regarding the future of the world is significant. However, such responses to the events and processes outlined above have been markedly negative and reactive. That is, the most visible popular opposition to neoliberalism, the finance crisis, the conflicts in the Middle East and encroachments on civil liberties has been encapsulated in a series of ‘anti-s’: anti-capitalism, anti-globalization, anti-war and anti-imperialism.
This contemporary trend, which some have seen as a continuation of the spirit of revolt from 1968, emerged most clearly in the final year of the previous century. Since 1999, self-professed anti-globalization and anti-capitalist campaigners have led public protests against global capitalism and the organizations and institutions, such as the WTO, IMF and G7, deemed responsible for propagating the expansion of neoliberalism. This has resulted in direct action in, among other places, Seattle, Washington, Genoa, London and Athens. Such protests have garnered significant attention in the media and have served to associate leftist politics with opposition. At the same time, anti-war and anti-imperialist groups have opposed US-led actions in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, Israeli actions against Hamas and Hezbollah and, now, NATO bombing in Libya.
While there are various reasons to support or oppose these positions (to be clear, the contributors to this volume are likely to adopt a range of different positions on each of these issues), ‘Marxism’ has found itself almost exclusively associated with or subsumed within movements of opposition and reaction. Although this may afford Marxists a means of involving themselves in broader movements, it also serves to lower the profile of Marxism and hinder the articulation of certain Marxist or even post-Marxist alternatives. It is important that these alternatives, however diffuse and contradictory, be developed and articulated and that the different forms of the Marxist left become defined by what they seek constructively to offer, rather than by what they oppose. Only by engaging openly and fully in ultimately normative questions of the nature, form and desirability of revolutions, the shape and scope of democracy, the actions of opponents of capitalist societies, the content and possibility of distributive justice, the place of civil liberties in socialist societies, the shape of constitutions and the relative weight afforded consequentialism and deontology, and the possibility of legitimate diversity in political form, will leftist approaches be able to escape pragmatic anonymity.
The project of post-Marxism was intended as a response to these questions in order to create a scheme capable of making real political progress, with essentialist understandings of human nature and justifications for authoritarian politics rejected in favour of inclusive, pluralist radical democracy. Yet, while these ideas have gained currency within, and often beyond, the radical left, there remain pressing concerns about the viability of post-Marxism as a project. Does it have the organizational capacity and can it exert the emotive appeal to attract and sustain support for the radical democratic alternatives it proposes?
This book is an attempt to outline the challenges faced by those influenced by Marx and to put forward a range of ways in which the left, in its various, diverse ideological forms, can make real, substantive and positive contributions to contemporary debates and concerns.
Structure of the book
While the contributors to this collection may disagree, in some cases fundamentally, on the nature of, and responses to, contemporary challenges, conflicts and developments (and, perhaps, to the phrasing of this introduction), there exists a recurring theme of reflection: on paths chosen, on strategies adopted and on paradigmatic shifts. This serves, not simply to provide an account of where particular branches of the Marxist left stand in relation to current issues, but to identify lessons from the past which can enable those influenced by Marx to achieve relevance in the future. There are no impenetrable boundaries between sections of the collection precisely because the issues with which the chapters engage are broad and dealt with in different ways by different paradigms. The chapters within the volume are eclectic, representing the diversity and fragmentation within the field, but build upon one another. They move from definitional work on the meaning of Marxism to critical concern regarding forms of revolutionary praxis and dismissive approaches to developing societies, to substantive engagement with the global justice debate, to consideration of principles and processes of justice and the scope for pluralism within Marxist constitutions, to the nature of revolutionary subjectivity in post-Marxism and, finally, to evaluation of post-Marxism, its effect on Marxism and its potential actively to foster political change, returning to and expanding upon the core concerns of Norman Geras in Chapter 1. If there is a thematic structure to the collection, it is that the early chapters deal with Marxism and its relationship with liberalism, the middle chapters focus on the practical application of Marxism and the influence of local conditions, while the final chapters examine post-Marxism.
Norman Geras has been at the forefront of Marx scholarship for several decades. In recent years he has contributed to public discourse on current affairs through his widely read normblog.typepad.com. Well known for his iconoclasm, Geras sets about examining what it means to be a Marxist, putting forward three core definitions: personal, intellectual and socio-political. Through analysis of these definitions, Geras argues that attempts to circumscribe Marxism by those on the Marxist left should be rejected. Citing apologetic or ambivalent responses to apparently regressive or anti-democratic movements and regimes, he claims that the Marxist left has served to stifle possibilities for diversity, plurality and debate within the left over such issues as international intervention or the participation by Israeli academics in public discourse. Rather, Geras claims that a range of Marxist-influenced approaches can, and should, be developed, in particular, those which seek reconciliation with that other, much maligned, Enlightenment approach – liberalism. In order to rejuvenate itself and to play an important role in socio-political life, Geras believes that the left needs to supplement contextual understanding of the functioning of societies and critical assessment of inequalities with acknowledgement of the comparative successes of democratic societies despite their flaws.
In Chapter 2, Joseph Femia explores the scientific credentials of Marxism. For Femia, those who examine this aspect of Marx (and Marxism) usually adopt one of two contrasting positions. Marx is either depicted as a great scientist, on a par with Copernicus, whose findings are ‘objective truth’ (as in the case of Plekhanov), or he and his followers are derided as scientific imposters, whose elastic terminology allows them to explain away any contrary evidence (as in the case of Popper). In Femia’s opinion, Vilfredo Pareto, the pioneering Italian sociologist, provided a more measured evaluation. To Pareto, Marx made two impressive scientific discoveries: that the struggle between social groups is a key element in social life and that moral and political ideas are historically and culturally variable rather than universal and timeless. However, according to Pareto, Marxist ‘science’ had been subverted by the ‘essentialism’ Marx inherited from Hegel (resulting in metaphysical concepts such as ‘surplus value’ and the ‘dialectic’), and by the intense moralism he inherited from the utopian socialists (accounting for the obvious value preferences that coloured his description of capitalism). Femia, for the most part, endorses Pareto’s analysis, but also notes that his attack on Marx’s use of abstraction might be considered somewhat unfair, given that Pareto himself insisted – when he was not discussing Marx – that abstraction was essential to the scientific enterprise. The value of Pareto’s account, for Femia, lies in his assertion that Marx sought, ‘with limited success, to unify two contrary human impulses: the one that drives us to extend our knowledge of the external world and the one that impels us to seek the existential comfort of metaphysical postulates’.
Alan Johnson, in Chapter 3, builds upon Geras’ chapter in his examination of Slavoj Žižek’s theory of revolution. Žižek has gained attention in recent years as one of the key intellectual figures on the radical left, stimulating interest in Marx and critical theory in general through his melding of Marxian, Hegelian and Lacanian thought. For Johnson, however, this contribution is far from an unalloyed good. Drawing on his personal engagement with Žižek, Johnson highlights a number of troubling trends towards violent, totalitarian and ‘psychotic’ politics. For Johnson, there is good reason to treat cautiously Žižek’s faith in a priori Hegelian dialectical models of development and Blanquist forms of praxis which lead him to inflict revolution in order to make reality conform to transhistorical laws. Johnson argues that Žižek’s understanding of revolution as a self-less, voluntaristic Badiouan ‘Event’ is derived from a misconceived application of the Lacanian ‘Act’. Johnson draws on the anti-totalitarian resources of Charles Lefort to suggest that Žižek’s thought amounts to an all-pervasive and narcissistic desire for abstraction from society, a spiritualized aesthetic of death and a totalitarian communitarianism. Johnson then demonstrates the fundamental dislocation of this approach from the validation of autonomy, self-realization and maturation in Marx’s account of revolution before concluding that Žižek’s theory of revolution, by repeating a number of twentieth-century tragedies, serves simply to undermine two aims which should be central to the left: the extension of the democratic revolution and the ‘complete reconceptualization of the political in the light of the totalitarian experience’.
In affirming and expanding upon Alan Johnson’s contribution, Paul Bowman, in Chapter 4, reflects on the objects and nature of Žižek’s polemics and their reception in left-leaning circles. Bowman’s focus lies on the difficulty of reading and disentangling Žižek’s eclectic, erratic and inconsistent works and his tendency to reject critiques, such as those of Johnson, as ‘misreadings’. For Bowman, Žižek contradicts his occasional self-professed objectivism by rejecting as inaccurate attempts to present a ‘true’ position on his work. This may, unintentionally, suggests Bowman, be seen as a virtue, with Žižek demonstrating commitment to provocation and critique, rather than consistency. However, more often than not, it is used simply to side-step accusations of the sort levelled by Johnson, without dealing adequately with the troubling trends which litter his work. For Bowman, Žižek’s use of cultural studies as a term of derision is grounded in the sort of caricaturing found among the reactionary right. Tracing a demonstrative encounter from one of his own edited collections, Bowman argues that, while Žižek’s polemical style maps swiftly significant debates, disputes and controversies, it does so by ‘not reading, not engaging, not reflecting and not seeking or digging to find out whether things are actually as Žižek says they are’. This, claims Bowman, leads Žižek’s work to read like a series of jokes directed at the subjects of concern – women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities, etc. – for many in cultural studies and the broader left. Bowman suggests that, while it is possible for the intellectual left to laugh at its own contradictions, Johnson’s work, among others, shows Žižek to be, in some measure, worryingly ill-disposed towards these groups and the movements which see their status as being of fundamental concern to modern, leftist, democratic politics. For Bowman, it is this dislike for minorities and democratic politics which is significantly consistent throughout Žižek’s work, revealing a man transfixed and possibly threatened by the multicultural transformation of the world and the dissolution of the traditional monopoly by white men of academic power.
In Chapter 5, Ronaldo Munck examines the legacy of Marxism’s engagement with development. He traces the shift from the ‘ambiguity’ of classical Marxism with regard to Ireland and Russia, through the realization of Marxism–Leninism as a development ideology, the subsequent emergence, in the 1960s and 1970s, of Marxism as a primarily Third World ideology of nationalist anti-imperialism, and the later flourishing of capitalism in China and India, to the anti-globalization movements of the 1990s. Munck claims that, today, Marxism is not a key player in development debates, not least because of the ideological victory of the neoliberal approach which dominates even the critical voices of those such as Joe Stiglitz. To regain relevance, Munck argues that Marxism must engage substantively in dialogue with postcolonial and post-development thought in order to ‘regain some of the dialectical subtlety of the founders of Marxism and develop guides to action rather than proclamatory critiques’.
In Chapter 6, I seek to link elements of the concerns of Geras, Johnson and Munck in assessing the alliances formed in recent years between Marxists and regressive socio-political forces. In an era in which the left has become increasingly associated with anti-movements, I suggest that one of the most disturbing and counter-productive developments has been the desire of certain self-professed Marxists, such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), to channel opposition to capitalism, imperialism and war, into support for ‘native’, ‘anti-imperialist’ and, often, Islamist forces, particularly in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. I argue that this is anything but Marxian. I consider, first, Marx’s stagist defence of capitalist expansionism before examining his opposition to imperialism in his late writings on Russia. I suggest that, cutting through these apparently contradictory positions on imperialism, there is belief that actions be evaluated according to the extent to which they increase the potential for needs to be satisfied and capabilities promoted. I claim that, even if Western imperialism is judged to have been a poor means of achieving this good, there is still no reason to support Islamist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan. Putting forward a series of reasons for the attraction of certain Marxists to these groups, I argue that what is required is a Marxism which looks beyond its ‘anti-’ focus and comes to engage more fully in promoting a positive account of progress grounded in the sort of interests identified by Marx as being universal to the species.
One means of regenerating the positive focus of the left is examined by Lawrence Wilde in Chapter 7. Noting the absence of Marx from contemporary debates on global justice, Wilde argues that there is both scope and need for Marxist engagement in moral discourse. He claims that Marx’s own reluctance to advance moral positions was due to a tactical desire to avoid a utopian socialism ignorant of existing conditions and parameters of action. Beneath this, for Wilde, lies a universal eudaemonistic ethics which was explicit in Marx’s early writings and implicit in his mature political economy. With faith in proletarian movements undermined by the experiences of the twentieth century, Wilde argues that it is essential that Marxists engage morally in the global justice debate as part of the global class struggle against, in particular, neoliberalism. To this end, he demonstrates the way in which Marx’s essentialist eudaemonistic ethics can assist in actualizing the apparent aims of one key paradigm of global justice – Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. Wilde argues that the value of the approach is constrained by Nussbaum’s political liberalism and its commitment to private property, which fails adequately to acknowledge the importance to human flourishing of fundamental, structural change to existing, inegalitarian socio-economic systems. For Wilde, in order effectively to realize Nussbaum’s ten principles for global justice, we need to transcend liberalism by acknowledging the need for both political and socio-economic equality and rejecting historical commitments to charity in favour of attempts to address the structural causes of inequalities.
In Chapter 8, Mark Cowling examines Marxist contributions to criminological thought, noting in particular the consequences of developing a society to promote the sort of ends outlined by Wilde in Chapter 7 on accounts of crime. He begins by rejecting the association made by Marx and Engels of crime with the lumpenproletariat, highlighting links between that account and the neoliberal account of welfare dependency, before arguing that any use of alienation theory is too vague to be of comprehensive value. He then examines the possibility that crime may be part of the reproduction conditions of capital, highlighting stark differences between capitalist criminal justice systems to argue that it is merely a contingent, rather than necessary, condition. Cowling then argues that law has some substance independent of ruling class interests and can be used under limited circumstances to defend workers, before turning his attention to Rawls’ notion that criminal acts disturb just patterns of distribution. Examining disparities in the way in which middle class and street crime are prosecuted, Cowling suggests that there is significant scope for Marxists to link together distributive and criminal justice. Finally, Cowling comes to consider whether crime will disappear in a communist society. He claims that it will not. Indeed, even if a communist society is otherwise attractive, there is reason to believe that activities which are currently legal will be criminalized. With the eradication of private property, a communist society will have to decide, for example, from a range of incompatible activities such as farming, house building, rambling and quad biking, for which ends the countryside can be used. Those whose ends are rejected may wish to subvert the society and state (in whatever form it remains). Likewise, while subjective constraints on sexual behaviour would presumably be rejected, there might still be crime motivated by immanent feelings of jealousy or passion. There might also be continuing debates regarding ages of consent and extreme forms of degradation.
In Chapter 9, Chengyi Peng examines the development and implications of Sinicized Marxist Constitutionalism (SMC) in light of over three decades of party-led reform. Peng begins by outlining reasons for the development of SMC, citing codification of law since the Cultural Revolution, the dissemination of liberal constitutional ideals from the West and response to these ideals by ‘New Confucians’ and the growth of interest in the ‘Chinese Model’ within academia. Peng then presents five approaches to understanding the contents of SMC: a homogenizing Western Liberal Constitutionalism; an empirical transitionalism towards liberalism; Marxist Party State with rule of law; Marxist Party State pillared with orthodox ideology and, finally, Marxist party-state supported by a new organic eclectic ideology. Peng argues that it is this final approach, which assumes the existence of an organic unity of ‘the leadership of the Party, the position of the people as masters of the country, and the rule of law’, all guided by a set of eclectic ideological imperatives, which is most plausible. The institutions are seen to seek to reconcile and achieve harmony between apparently competing consequentialist and deontological imperatives, with the materialism of Marxist approaches contrasted with rights-based tenets in liberal approaches. For Peng, it is the distinctive way in which this is being resolved which lies at the heart of Sinicized Marxist constitutionalism, with significant academic interest now focused on its accompanying form of jurisprudence. This has the potential, suggests Peng, to challenge the hegemony of WLC and homogeneity of constitutional ideals.
Terrell Carver examines this possibility in Chapter 10. Responding to the core claims and tenets of Peng’s thesis, Carver outlines internal contradictions and tensions in ‘Western’ constitutionalism. Tracing the bloody, unpredictable and often contingent development of Western constitutions, Carver argues that the notion of the United States as an ideal embodiment of constitutionalism is flawed and serves simply to neglect the heterogeneity of constitutional forms. Comparing the systems of the United States, United Kingdom and elsewhere to the constitutional tenets of Locke, Carver demonstrates that the definition of, and relationship between, apparently indispensible components of constitutionalism, such as democracy, separation of powers, rule of law and party politics, are anything but fixed, uncontested and inevitable. For Carver, there needs to be serious recognition of legitimate local influences on constitutional forms, including, potentially, in China, and protest at illegitimate ones such as the global war on terror. Carver then brings the discussion to the relationship between Marx and Marxism and constitutionalism, highlighting Marx’s own partially instrumental, liberal democratic sympathies and desire to achieve a transcendence, rather than rejection, of liberalism by removing traditional obstacles to the development of forces of production and, ultimately, human flourishing. Placing these concerns in the present, Carver asks whether liberal democracy is any more capable than one-party governance of achieving instrumental goods associated with the development of the forces of production or whether a system such as that in China is a mere ‘pragmatic and moral perversion’ of capitalism. Explaining that Marxism is a perfectionist, outcome based, rather than a procedural, deontological, paradigm, Carver argues that discussions in China about the place and extent of individual rights are understandable. Indeed, for Carver, in an age of excess in the private sector and austerity in the public, this is one key issue which remains of great importance globally.
The focus of the book now moves towards examination of an approach which has sought to acknowledge diversity while claiming to develop a radical, revolutionary alternative to both Marxism and liberalism: post-Marxism. As Oliver Harrison explains in Chapter 11, however, the break from Marxism is far from conclusive in the thought of post-Marxists such as Ernesto Laclau and Alain Badiou. For Harrison, the fact that these thinkers employ the thought of self-professed Marxists, Antonio Gramsci and Mao Tse-Tung, to seek to break from Marx means that a Marxist heritage remains. Harrison traces closely this heritage by comparing and contrasting the specific accounts and conditions of revolutionary subjectivity in Marx, Laclau and Badiou. Through this extensive analysis, Harrison agrees with Laclau that, while, as for Marx, a crisis is a pre-condition of revolution, revolution is immanent in the existing conditions of society only insofar as it enables revolutionary subjectivity. Despite his post-Marxist disdain for meta-narratives, Badiou conserves elements of dogma in his insistence on universal, though not totalizing, truths. The overarching message drawn from the chapter is that breaking from Marxism while remaining on the critical left is easier said than done.
This conclusion is examined further in Stuart Sim’s evaluation, in Chapter 12, of the historical development and current status of post-Marxism, particularly with regard to its relationship with and influence on Marxism. For Sim, one of the key features of post-Marxism has been the adoption of postmodern tenets, particularly with regard to the rejection of authoritarianism and essentialism and affirmation of pluralism and diversity. He argues that, beyond this unifying feature, there are elements which define two broad post-Marxist traditions. The first was developed by Laclau and Mouffe as part of a project to revitalize the left, ridding it of the harmful legacies of Marxism, such as its extremely prescriptive understanding of revolutionary subjects, and enabling it to promote more clearly radical democracy through engagement with ethnic minorities, feminists and those concerned with the environment. The second was developed by Lyotard and Baudrillard as a form of anti-Marxism, favouring uncontrollable contingency, unpredictability, ‘little narrative’ and pragmatic ad hoc single-issue protest in place of the universalizing tenets of historical materialism, grand narratives and positive accounts of the ways in which to bring about radical social change.