Contents of spoon-archives/seminar-14.archive/spinoza-marx_1995/spinoza.hol
(c) Gene Holland
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_RETHINKING THE POLITICAL WITHIN MARXISM: SPINOZA VS HEGEL_
(1) Though perhaps best known to English-speaking readers for
his trenchant interventions in literary-critical theory, some of
Macherey's most important subsequent work has been in the field
of political philosophy, in an attempt to rethink the political
within Marxism. For Macherey (and many others), the impetus to
reevaluate Marxism arose in response to a number of post-war
developments, in the fields of politics and academics alike: the
decline of the French working class as a "class-conscious"
political actor, and of the @Parti Communiste Fran‡ais@ as its
"revolutionary" vanguard, in Fifth Republic politics and society;
but also the demise of Soviet and Chinese Communisms as viable or
attractive Marx-inspired regimes; and within academics, the
growing dissatisfaction with certain Hegelian elements of
Marxism, in historiography as well as in philosophy itself.
(2)Interpretations of the great Revolution of 1789 served as a
lightening-rod for much of the historians' dissatisfaction, as
revisionist scholars challenged the Marxist notion that 1798 was
a "bourgeois" revolution which could serve as a model for a
"proletarian" revolution to come. {cite Furet, Comminel} The
issue was not so much the *results* of 1789 -- which undeniably
shifted the balance of power away from the aristocracy and
eventually led to the installation of bourgeois rule (albeit some
60 year later) -- as the role of the bourgeoisie *as a class* in
prosecuting it. There is an important sense in which the French
bourgeoisie *did not make* the Revolution: it was "started"
largely by the aristocracy and "finished" in a way by the people
of Paris; and the important roles played by numerous members of
the French bourgeosie arguably do not add up to the actions of a
class actively pursuing its economic interests by political
means. In one version of a "materialist" philosophy of history,
transposing the Hegelian master-slave dialectic from
interpersonal into social terms made social classes (rather than
"Absolute Spirit") the subjects of history; but they remained
*subjects*: groups each conceived on the model of a single
subject -- and yet comprised of many individual subjects --
acting (consciously or not) in pursuit of "its" class interests.
The problem, in short, was how to square the actual diversity of
motives and actions of particular French merchants, lawyers, and
statesmen with the unifying notion of the bourgeoisie *as a
class* acting as a (singular) political agent in the historical
field (rather than as a personification of capital in the
economic field, where class definitions and functions seem
*relatively* unproblematic).
(3)Whence the import of Althusser's preemptive move: to declare
history to be a "process without a subject," and thus drive a
wedge between "messy" narrative accounts of concrete actors'
roles in historical process, on one hand, and "rigorous"
definitions of class functions within the mode of production, on
the other. One of the several important effects of Althusser's
efforts within philosophy to discredit Hegelian "expressive
causality," then, was to "solve" the problem of class agency in
historiography by declaring it moot: Marxism was not a
historicism (the other major aim being to undermine PCF
Stalinism, cf Fred). As in so many facets of his attack on
Hegel, Althusser drew here on the philosophy of Spinoza (cf his
_El‚ments d'auto-critique_, pp.65-83), who distinguished the
humanly inexhaustible infinity of causal relations underlying
historical process from the "clear and distinct" ideas humans can
produce regarding the laws and mechanisms of that process. For
Hegel, whose starting point is Nothingness, the real is the
rational and the rational is the real, and a seamless, definitive
account of the historical process is therefore possible; for
Spinoza, by contrast, whose starting point is Nature or
Substance, real and rational comprise two distinct levels of
apprehension: on one level, the inexhaustibly rich yet
ineluctably opaque world that we inhabit; on a second level, the
best understanding of that world human reasoning can provide, but
only by taking a necessary distance from the first. It is this
Spinozan distinction between two categorically different kinds of
thought that underlies the science-ideology dyad so central to
Althusserian thought.
(4)Macherey developed the implications of this dyad for literary
studies in his well-known _Theory of Literary Production_ (1966).
But in his next major work, _Hegel ou Spinoza_ (1979), he returns
to the source of that distinction, and examines the issues at
stake in choosing between Spinoza and Hegel. Althusser had
already (in _El‚ments d'auto-critique_) quickly outlined some of
the benefits of Spinozan materialism to the project of freeing
Marxism from Hegelian idealism: a conception of ideology as a
"materialism of the imaginary" and of science as basically
mathematical (derived from the first two of Spinoza's three kinds
of knowledge); a model of non-transcendent causality whereby the
("absent") cause is immanent in its effects (which Althusser
regretted calling "structural" causality); and a view of human
action and history that was anti-subjective and resolutely non-
teleological. Against the backdrop of Althusser's work (cited
p.11), but without considering Marx or Marxism, Macherey sets out
in _Hegel ou Spinoza_ to explain why Spinoza represents the "true
alternative to Hegelian philosophy" (13).
(5)Before entering into the details of Macherey's comparison, we
should be clear what the thrust of his major claim is, especially
since its implications for a non-Hegelian Marxism are not spelled
out. The key assertion is that "Spinoza... refutes Hegel,
objectively" (13). Macherey insists that Spinoza and Hegel
addressed many of the same problems, but solved them in very
different, not to say diametrically opposed, ways. Hegel well
understood that Spinoza was a strong precursor, but *had to *
*misread him*, Macherey suggests, in order to maintain his
subjective idealism and integrate Spinoza into his evolutionist
view of the history of philosophy, whereby any predecessor had to
be found inferior in some way [see pp.11-13, 90-94, 107, 137-42,
157, 258]. Hegel's defensive misreading of Spinoza thus takes on
"the value of a symptom" (12), in that it constructs "Spinoza" as
deficient because Hegel's own teleological-subjective-idealist
premises prevented him from seeing his precusor's non-finalistic,
anti-subjective materialism. So by examining how and why Hegel's
reading of Spinoza goes wrong, Macherey not only restores to the
history of philosophy (and, I would want to add, to Marxism) what
is valuable in Spinoza as an alternative to Hegel, but also
*shows* that Hegel's history of philosophy *and therefore Hegel's
*philosophy of history* are wrong: Spinoza represents not a
moment that could be simply cancelled-retained-surpassed
(@aufgehoben@) by the march of philosophical progress, but a
*road not taken*, an objectively pre-existing perspective in
philosophy that *gets suppressed* with the (perhaps temporary,
certainly local) triumph of Hegelianism and idealism in Western
philosophy (including much Marxism). {ftnt SJ Gould's corrective
to teleologism in evolutionary theory} Macherey's reading is thus
classic Althusserian ideology-critique: not an assertion that
Hegel happened to get Spinoza wrong, but a demonstration that,
given his premises and project, Hegel *had to* get Spinoza wrong,
*in a specific way* and for specific reasons.
(6)In contrast with (and defense of) his own position, then,
Hegel construes Spinoza's philosophy as positivistic and static,
entirely lacking that essential, dynamizing feature of his own
system: negativity. In the Hegelian dialectic, negativity is
what enables Spirit, from the starting-point of Nothingness, to
posit itself as substance (the initial negation), then recuperate
itself as Spirit (the negation of the negation) in a (the)
historical process that leads ultimately to the reconciliation-
reintegration of substance in Absolute Spirit at the end of
history. The charges against such a view, especially within
Marxism, are well-known: idealism, in that its starting-point,
ending-point, and main actor are all Spirit or Mind;
transcendental subjectivism, in that this historicl agent,
Absolute Spirit, is a subject that transcends any and all
concrete subjects and indeed history itself; teleologism, in that
the end of history is guaranteed by the dialectial process of
negation of negation, so that even errors and mishaps eventually
contribute to the realization of Absolute Spirit through history.
And yet much of what passes as "Marxist" philosophy of history --
including much (though not all) of Marx's own -- simply
translates or inverts Hegelian *idealism* into a "materialism"
that nonetheless *retains* the transcendental subjectivism and
the teleologism: classes act as transcendental subjects in the
historical "dialectic" of class struggle, which will according to
necessary laws produce a classless society with the collapse of
capitalism at the end of history. This grand eschatalogical
narrative, as I have already suggested, no longer inspires total
confidence, even among Marxists. Rather than rehearse the well-
known critiques, Macherey's study proposes Spinoza as "the true
alternative to Hegel" and, if only by implication, to Hegelian
Marxism.
(7)To be true alternatives, however, Spinoza and Hegel must have
something in common: as Macherey shows, the basic principle they
share is that thought and matter are "ultimately" identical. But
the forms of this "ultimate identity" are very different. In
place of Hegel's idealism, which submits matter to thought via
the negation of the negation, Spinoza offers a position which (as
Macherey notes), is certainly anti-idealist, if not actually
materialist. Rather than elevate thought over matter (or matter
over thought, as in a simple "materialist" inversion of
idealism), Spinoza considers thought and matter to be absolutely
*co-equal*: Thought and Extension are different but not opposed
("non opposita sed diversa") modes of Substance. And as modes of
the *same* unique Substance, their identity is given -- whereas
for Hegel, the identity of Spirit and matter is only achieved at
the end of history. Even more important: for Spinoza, Thought is
a property of Substance, not of a subject; in place of Hegel's
transcendental subjectivism, Spinoza offers a kind of immanent
objectivism, for which no negativity and no contradiction are
possible or necessary. (The success of Cartesian geometry and
Spinoza's own practice as an optician no doubt contributed
considerably to his conviction that the universe is knowable in
its own terms, that it has mathematical "Thought" as one of its
innate properties.) The Spinozan universe, then, is objectively
knowable; knowability is one of its inherent features.
(8)But whether such objective knowability is ever subjectively
realized in human thinking is a very different question, for
Spinoza: it depends on humans overcoming the subjective
limitations of "first-level thought" through critical reflection,
thereby enabling "second-level thought" to approximate more
closely the "objective" Thought inherent in Substance itself.
The development of adequate ideas does not follow automatically
from the march of Spirit and the ruse of reason, but depends on
humans' ability to distance themselves from the distortions of
subject-centered thinking, which Spinoza calls "imagination" (and
Althusser, "ideology"). This ability varies (socially,
politically, historically), and is *in no way* guaranteed to
increase through history. So in place of Hegel's teleologism,
Spinoza offers only the *possibility* that humans will forgo the
illusions of subject-centered imagination and develop more
adequate knowledge.
(9)Finally -- and this is where Spinoza's materialism comes into
play -- the prime measure of such adequacy is not some ultimate
reconciliation of Spirit and matter, but rather the degree to
which human potential (@potentia@) is realized and increased.
Humankind is a determinate mode of objective Substance just like
everything else in Nature, and as such it tends (according to the
principle Spinoza calls "conatus" - striving) to develop its
potential to the utmost. What distinguishes humans is that, by
acting in the mode of Thought as well as Extension, they are able
to understand, submit to, participate in, and thereby *develop*
the forces of Nature, of which they nonetheless remain a part.
(This insistence on the *situatedness* of humankind in and as
part of Nature is what endears Spinoza to modern-day
environmentalists, along with his critique of and "monist"
alternative to Cartesian subject-object dualism.) Unlike
imagination, adequate thinking furthers human-natural development
rather than hindering it.
(10)Spinoza's own practice of "second-level" critical reflection
targeted religion as the dominant mode of "imaginary" thinking;
yet his assessment of it is historical rather than strictly
epistemological. The Judeo-Christian tradition whose history he
was among the first to study from a secular perspective was not
simply *wrong*: it served certain purposes for a certain group at
the time of its development; but by Spinoza's own time, it had
long out-lived its usefulness and now acted as a hindrance to the
development of human-natural forces (@potentia@), especially in
its opposition to the natural sciences. We might today, in a
similar vein, claim that the ideology and practices of possessive
individualism associated with the capitalist market may for a
time have increased the human-natural potential, but that they
have by our time become a hindrance and even a threat to the
continuing development of that potential.
(11)It may now be possible to discern the kind of "materialist
dialectic" that Macherey hints at (without developing) in the
conclusion of _Hegel ou Spinoza_, which closes with the question
of "what distinguishes an idealist dialectic from a materialist
dialectic" (259): "Reading Spinoza after, but not according to,
Hegel enables us to pose the question of a non-hegelian
dialectic... [even though] it does not in and of itself enable us
to answer it" (260). A materialist dialectic derived from
Spinoza would bear strong resemblances to one of the
philsosophies of history found in Marx himself {ref. article
laying out four of them; but also discuss question of "influence"
of Spinoza on Marx, citing _Cahiers Spinoza_ articles and Negri's
_Marx Beyond Marx_}: the one positing a dialectic of forces and
relations of production *instead of* class struggle as the "motor
of history" {ftnt: not an epistemological "break," which is still
too teleological, but coexistence and tension between two (or
more) models of history within the Marxian corpus -- incumbent on
Marxists to decide which (or which combination or derivative) is
most adequate}. This is perhaps the least Hegelian of Marx's
philosophies of history, inasmuch as it eschews the
transcendental subjectivism and the teleologism of the class
struggle model. For it is not a matter here of a contradiction
between antithetical class-subjects necessarily leading to the
synthesis of classless society, but of a tension between two
ensembles -- forces and relations of production -- which not only
are not subjectivities themselves, but also cut across class
boundaries altogether {ftnt: forces of production include the
labor power of "the proletariat", but also technology and
organization provided by "the bourgeoisie" (not to mention the
resources and forces of nature); the relations of production
include the relations between the classes, to be sure, but also
cultural or ideological elements common to both workers and
capitalists, e.g. possessive individualism, asceticism}.
(12)Yet this Marxian model, considered from the perspective of
Spinozan materialism, still contains residual elements of
transcendental subjectivism and teleologism: teleologism inasmuch
as stagnant production relations *necessarily* come into conflict
at some point with productive forces that *nevertheless continue
*to develop*, thereby eventually causing a revolutionary
explosion which eliminates the old relations and replaces them
with ones better able to continue developing the productive
forces; and a certain subjectivism inasmuch as the development of
these *human-centered* productive forces, with "species-being"
as transcendental subject, is still considered the *motor* of
history (though not necessarily its @telos@, which is rather the
realization of human freedom presumed to *depend on* the
development of productive forces -- by now a rather dubious or at
least outmoded assumption {cf Marcuse, among others}). Spinozan
materialism would eliminate these residuals in two ways.
(13)First of all, for Spinoza the "productive forces" at issue
in history are not exclusively or primarily those of humankind,
but those of Nature as a whole, of which humankind is of course
an integral part, but only a part. Spinoza thus offers a kind of
anti-humanism (perhaps even more thorough-going than Althusser's
own) that would impel Marxism to eschew "productivism" (i.e., the
exclusive focus on *marketable* productive forces) and consider
humankind (as Marx himself often does) a *part* of Nature rather
than, in Hegelian fashion, as its Master.
(14)Secondly, and especially with "productive forces" understood
in this way to mean those of Nature broadly construed (i.e.
including but not limited to humankind), Spinozan materialism
would completely remove the inevitability of revolution and the
progressivism of historical process itself, for there is *no *
*guarantee* for Spinoza that human thought will continually or
even consistently achieve the objectivity required to help rather
than hinder the development of productive forces. There is no
guarantee, in other words, that developing marketable productive
forces will *necessarily* break the shackles of stagnant
production relations, nor even that productive forces in the
broad sense will *keep developing* continuously. What if, on the
contrary, stagnant production relations become so entrenched as
to prevent revolution altogether, and even to cause the
productive forces to *diminish* instead of continue developing?
Isn't this in fact already the case? {ftnt: Negri/Virilio:
1917/1929 as crucial turning-point, where crisis leads not to the
overthrow of capital liberating its productive potential but to
the self-destruction of that potential, ultimately in the form of
permanent war instead of consumer leisure and luxury.} For
Marxism, a rigorously non-teleological philosophy of history
would have to face the possibility (the contemporary reality?)
that, on balance, current production relations promote the
*destruction* rather than the development of productive forces --
whether these are construed narrowly, as in classical Marxism (in
which case that destruction targets the productive potential of
human labor, and takes the all-too prevalent forms of genocide,
malnutrition, sexism and racism, under- and unemployment, stunted
intellectual growth through inadequate education, etc.), or more
broadly, as in Spinozan materialism (in which case we are talking
about the productive potential of Nature, and the equally-
prevalent pattern of world-wide ecocide: environmental
degradation, habitat loss, species depletion, etc.). {ftnt:
genocide as perhaps an extreme example of the destruction of
productive forces narrowly construed; but consider also how
chronic impoverishment saps to the abilities (labor-power) of its
victims, especially in the Third World; and how chronic pollution
saps the health (and hence the labor-power) of the working
population, especially in the industrialized world [ref. _Nation_
article].}
* * * *
(15)These are just a few of the implications of making a choice
between Hegel and Spinoza, for which Macherey's important study
laid much of the groundwork. Then, two years after his _Hegel ou
_Spinoza_ appeared, the Italian legal and political philosopher
Antonio Negri published a very different kind of book on Spinoza,
_L'anomalia salvaggia. Saggio su potere e potenza in Baruch _
_Spinoza_ (1981). Where Macherey offered a purely philosophical,
"internal" reading of Spinoza (along with Hegel), Negri (while
favorably citing Macherey on several occasions) situated Spinoza
and the evolution of his philosophy in the context of 17th-
century Dutch society, and made the relevance of Spinozan
materialism to contemporary Marxism an explicit theme. Testimony
to the book's importance, a French translation (_L'anomalie _
_sauvage: Puissance et pouvoir chez Spinoza_ [1982]) immediately
appeared, with no fewer than three prefaces: one by Macherey
himself, the other two by the equally prominent French Spinoza
scholars, Gilles Deleuze and Alexandre Matheron. In his short
preface, Macherey is content to emphasize and praise the way
Negri brings the thought of Spinoza "back to life" in connection
with current political concerns, reserving for the very end a
brief but pointed question regarding whether Negri's reading
might still be too teleological. But in a longer essay published
later that year ("De la m‚diation … la constitution: description
d'un parcours sp‚culatif," _Cahiers Spinoza_ no.4 [Hiver 1982-83]
pp.9-37), Macherey examines Negri's interpretation of Spinoza in
greater detail, and returns to the question of its residual
Hegelianism.
(16)The key to Negri's ground-breaking reading is the
distinction he draws in Spinoza between an inferior, early
pantheism (which he considers utopian and neo-platonic) and a
more mature materialism that Negri takes as a precursor to Marx's
own. Controversy and difficulties arise with this reading
because the dividing line separating what Negri calls the first
and second "foundations" of Spinoza's thought runs straight down
the middle of his major work, the _Ethics_. While it is true
that Spinoza did interrupt the composition of the _Ethics_, and
drafted a _Theologico-Political Treatise_ before returning to
revise and complete his @magnum opus@, it is far from clear from
the finished text exactly how much and how thoroughly the
"earlier version" was revised. Negri makes an already difficult
philological problem even worse, Macherey argues, by
*dramatizing* the evolution of Spinoza's thought in order to
establish a clear *historical* break between an eminently
disposable "first" Spinoza and an absolutely indispensable
"second" one. {ftnt Negri:Spinoza = Althusser:Marx}
(17)Negri's dramatization strikes Macherey as too Hegelian,
ironically enough -- given that Negri wants to claim Spinoza as a
true materialist and eradicate Hegelian dialectics from Marxism.
Not only is Negri's before/after narrative account of the two
"foundations" suspect for Macherey, but even more so is his claim
that it was "internal contradictions" in the first foundation
that impelled Spinoza beyond them and into the second foundation
(in a classic dialectical progression). Macherey feels Negri is
on far firmer ground when he cites "external," historical
circumstances instead of internal contradiction as the reason for
the evolution of Spinoza's thought; and it is surely one of the
unique strengths of Negri's reading that he situates Spinoza's
thought so carefully in the context of the potentially democratic
social relations of early Dutch capitalism: warding off the very
real threat of encroaching state absolutism was a major impetus
for Spinoza's explicitly political writings and, arguably but not
obviously, for his revision of the _Ethics_, as well. And yet,
even if one wanted to eliminate Hegelian contradiction *from *
*accounts of historical process *-- as Macherey clearly does --
couldn't the notion of contradiction retain some validity *in *
*accounts of philosophical thought* and the impetus for its
revision? Granted, it may finally be more convincing (especially
given the available textual evidence) to speak of a *tension*,
rather than an absolute break, between two "foundations" in
Spinoza (especially in the _Ethics_ itself), but couldn't the
development of the second be attributed (at least in part) to the
recognition of contradictions in the first, particularly if such
recognition were spurred (as Negri's contextual account suggests
it was) by dramatic historical events?
(18)In any case, Macherey accuses Negri of residual Hegelianism
in this first instance largely because he retains a narrative
account which includes the notion of contradiction at the level
of thought. The second instance he diagnoses is somewhat more
technical and certainly more far-reaching in its assessment of
Negri's stance. It has to do with the role in Spinoza's thought
of the notion of attributes (to which Macherey had himself
devoted considerable attention in his own book, pp.95-136),
regarding which Negri makes the same misinterpretation that Hegel
had, according to Macherey. For both, attributes supposedly
functioned as intermediaries between pure Substance and its
modes, making them available to consciousness; for Hegel, then,
Spinozan attributes represented a primitive and insufficient
dialectic; for Negri, they were already *too* dialectical and
would be abandoned by Spinoza himself in the "second foundation".
Negri's misreading of Spinozan attributes thus plays a crucial
role in his Hegelian dramatization of the evolution of Spinoza's
thought. But the ramifications go further, according to
Macherey. By refusing attributes their *constitutive* function
within an *identity* (rather than a dialectic) of Substance and
its modes, Negri splits the Spinozan perspective in two: into a
purely intellectual, ascetic project (corresponding to the first
foundation) on one hand, and a materialist project (corresponding
to the second foundation) on the other -- *whose realization
*would be deferred*, pending the development of productive
forces, until the present of Negri's writing.
(19)In thus claiming Spinoza as an "anomaly" whose "philosophy
of crisis" at the dawn of modern market society would only really
bear fruit centuries later at the twilight of modern market
society, i.e. in the present-day capitalist crisis, Negri
indulges in the kind of @a posteriori@ Hegelian teleologism both
he and Macherey are interested in eliminating from Marxian
thought. According to this version of a Marxist philosophy of
history, true democratic freedom becomes possible *when and only
*when sufficient development of productive forces* finally
releases humankind from the grip of dire necessity. We have had
to wait so long since Spinoza first put true democracy on the
modern agenda, but now, at last, the moment has (perhaps)
arrived... There are two problems with this ascetic teleology.
For one thing, there can be no assurance for Spinoza that
accomplishment of the "materialist" half of the ethical project
would in itself necessarily procure the accomplishment (viz. the
dissolution) of the "ascetic" half, no assurance that the ascetic
personality will "wither away" of its own accord in order to
partake of what Negri calls the "pleasure of the world": as noted
above, humankind has only the possibility, not the guarantee, of
attaining ideas adequate to true Thought and thus realizing
freedom. {ftnt R. Debray} (Hence the importance of Deleuze and
Guattari's project in the _Anti-Oedipus_: they insist, from a
Spinozan-materialist perspective, on diagnosing *both* the
ascetic personality *and* capitalist surplus-repression
simultaneously, *without* giving causal priority to either.) But
perhaps more important, Spinozan materialism (@pace@ Negri) rules
out any such "dialectic" between "materialist" and "ascetic"
projects: the productive forces of Substance (including human
productive forces) are at any given moment always precisely equal
to themselves and to the amount of freedom effectively realized
(though they also always contain further potential). There never
is, never has been, any negativity within Substance; it is always
full of productive force, even over-full with purely positive
potential to develop.
(20)Which is not to say that the potential of Substance is
always everywhere realized, nor that whatever degrees of
realization it does attain are ever simple or harmonious. On the
contrary, Spinoza acknowledged that the development of Substance
entailed increasing complexity, turbulence and conflict; on
Negri's reading, nothing brought this home to Spinoza more than
the emergence in 17th-century Dutch society of market capitalism,
which pitted individuals against one another to a degree the
corporate order of feudalism never had, thereby threatening the
very fabric of social order. Negri refers to this development as
the market-induced "crisis" of modern society, to which Spinoza
alone, in his view, gave an adequate response. And Macherey,
despite the charge of residual Hegelianism, clearly appreciates
the way Negri has pinpointed the political relevance of Spinoza
today. Once again, Macherey's own strategy of presentation
entails showing what Spinoza shares with Hegel and the tradition
of modern European political thought, in order then to highlight
what sets him radically apart. {ref Chicago SID essay} And here,
too, it turns out (on Macherey's reading) that Spinoza resembles
Hegel in crucial respects more than either Hobbes or Rousseau,
even while remaining a virulent critic of and viable alternative
to the dominant tradition they comprise. As Michael Hardt
(Negri's American translator) also insists, what sets Spinoza
apart is an original, materialist conception of the political
relation between "force" and "power" (@potentia@ and @potestas@)
{ref his transpref and M. Gueroult}, between the *basis* of
political power in effectively combined human activity and its
mediated *expression* in political institutions and command.
This bears examination in further detail.
(21)Like the others, Spinoza wanted to settle the question of
the basis of human society, given that its feudal-corporatist
basis had been thrown into crisis by the emergence of the market
and the ideology of "possessive individualism." But he *refused*
to consider that basis as somehow separate from human society
itself -- either in the form of "natural rights" pre-existing,
and then supposedly safeguarded by, the foundation of political
society, as per the social contract theories of Hobbes and
Rousseau; or in the form of transcendent Spirit and the ruse of
reason, which merely use human societies to realize their own
ends, as per Hegel. In contrast to Rousseau and Hobbes,
humankind's natural state for Spinoza is neither un-mitigated war
(Hobbes) nor solitary purity (Rousseau) but always already
political: human beings always live socially, and that sociality
is antagonistic except to the extent that humans realize (i.e.
recognize *and* actualize) the superior force of individuals
combined in cooperative groups relative to that of isolated
individuals and those combined in uncooperative ones {cite game-
theory article} -- that is to say, human society is inherently
and, as it were, aboriginally political. Indeed, Spinoza is most
unlike Rousseau, as Macherey points out, in that he insists that
the individual does not exist per se, but only as an abstraction
from the group(s) of which it is a part: as Macherey puts it,
"individuals exist and become conscious of themselves only on the
basis of reciprocal relations established between themselves and
others, which cause them to communicate [with one another] in the
first place" (SID, p.343). So for Spinoza, as for Hegel, the
political precedes the personal, and thus cannot be conceived on
the model of a voluntary contract among pre-existing individuals.
(22)But whereas for Hegel, the political has *a* history -- the
History of subjective Spirit realizing itself objectively through
peoples and the State, for Spinoza the political exists
immanently *in* history -- which is conceived as the (non-
teleological) ensemble of realizations of natural-human
potential. And whereas for Hegel, the supra-personal political
instance is the transcendental subjectivity of Spirit, for
Spinoza, it is simply natural force augmented by the equally
natural but historically contingent combination of individuals in
groups. Such combination produces a potentially infinite variety
of socio-political forms in history, but always stems from the
basic nature of human passion to knit interpersonal relations and
form groups. Humans thus don't (have to) "give over" their
natural rights to sovereign Power in order to safeguard their
private interests and found political society: their intepersonal
relations were already political to begin with, and their
political force depends on how well -- how extensively,
intensely, and harmoniously -- those passionate relations are
composed. This rejection of social contract eliminates any need
for transcendent authority (@potestas@), and instead grounds
politics immanently (non-dialectically) in the force of the group
(@potentia multitudine@). {ftnt examples of force/power: soccer
vs football, jazz vs symphony} There can therefore be no
justification or motive for submitting to external command or the
mediation of the State, inasmuch as human relations grounded in
passion inevitably take immediate political forms, without
requiring those passions to be contractually sublimated into the
interests of citizenship in the State. And at the same time, of
course, Spinoza's non-teleological view of history disallows any
Hegelian "ruse of reason" outwitting human motives and
guaranteeing that political forms as manifestations of objective
Spirit will improve; on the contrary, politics for Spinoza is a
field of passion more than reason, and it is incumbent on reason
to understand and try to make the most of natural-human passions
in improving political organization, rather than dominate or
supress them.
* * * *
(23)Such a realignment of the relations between reason and the
passions, humankind and nature has a certain postmodern ring to
it, no doubt; but even before the recent Franco-Italian
"rediscovery" of Spinoza {cite works}, his thought found echoes
in other political thinkers in the French tradition, notably the
early 19th-century utopian-socialist, Charles Fourier, and the
20th-century Marxist sociologist, Henri Lefebvre. Like Spinoza
(though it is unlikely his homespun education included the Dutch
philosopher), Fourier believed that the human passions formed the
core of any political arrangement, and that they could be fine-
tuned so as to enhance the productivity and joys of human
existence. But what makes Fourier read like a caricature of
Spinozan thought is the detailed -- even mathematical! -- blue-
print the French utopian constructed to map out the precise ways
the human passions should be combined to produce the most
harmonious result. Spinoza himself (in addition to rejecting
Fourier's patent, 19th-century teleologism) would have been more
content to let a harmonious pattern of organization emerge from
continual critique of existing arrangements; hence the profound
open-endedness of his thought, highlighted by Negri and Macherey
alike.
(24)In one important sense, Lefebvre's appreciation of the
haphazard quality of the innumerable interpersonal encounters
typical of modern city life comes closer to Spinozan thought:
Lefebvre and Spinoza both value density and complexity in
spontaneous interpersonal relations as a measure of the
development of human potential. And yet Lefebvre's view is still
too ascetic and teleological to be thoroughly Spinozan: city life
and the great Festivals it would make possible are certainly
unmediated expressions of group force (@potentia multitudine@),
but they represent for Lefebvre the culmination of a necessary
previous stage of development: his "urban revolution" presupposes
industrialization. This is Lefebvre's updated version of the
Marxian philosophy of history examined above, according to which
a period of human abnegation devoted to the development of
marketable productive forces is/was required in order to make the
realization of freedom possible. It comes as no surprise, then,
given the asceticism inherent in such a view, that Lefebvre makes
no mention of the productive forces of *nature* in this
"postindustrial" stage of human development, whereas Spinoza
insists always on relating the development of human productive
force to what Bataille in _La Part maudite_ calls the biosphere
{ref Bataille, _PM_ p.69}. Indeed, few French thinkers of the
20th century have stressed as rigorously as Bataille the
importance of situating human endeavor (and especially economics)
in the broader context of the superabundant forces of nature, as
Spinoza did -- even if the political implications of such a move
in Bataille are not entirely clear (beyond his pointed and
persuasive rejection of the ideology of utilitarianism).
(25)The political implications of Macherey's discussions of
Spinoza are somewhat clearer, if not always spelled out in his
own, more philosophically-minded writings: comparing Spinoza with
the bourgeois tradition culminating in Hegel suggests the
possibility of an anti-Hegelian, perhaps even a "non-
dialectical," Marxist politics. A Spinoza-inspired politics
would be non-dialectical in several related senses. {ftnt the
several other senses of "dialectical" that could be retained} It
would for one thing repudiate the dialectical opposition of
subject and object, according to which human freedom is (to be)
wrested from nature through the ascetic development of marketable
productive force at the expense of the productive force and human
enjoyment of nature (including our own "human nature"). Instead,
the struggle for freedom would be situated within and as part of
the development of nature, rather than as its conquest and
mastery; as Macherey puts it (in unfortunately masculinst terms),
liberation is not a manipulation of reality by a subject
who would situate himself somehow outside of the
arrangement he imposes on it: [liberation] is the
expression, the exertion of the ontological force that
constitutes the subject himself, not as an independent
individual, but as the [most] versatile element of the
collective system within whose network of interrelations
his action is inscribed.
And of course for Spinoza (whose view of freedom Macherey is
summarizing here), the "collective system" in which all human
action takes place is comprised not of human society alone, but
of the biosphere as a whole.
(26) A Spinozan-Marxist politics would, for another thing,
eschew mediation, the dialectical synthesis/resolution of
conflicts or differences on a higher plane -- such as the State
or the Party, which tend to re-impose the "higher plane" as self-
interested domination over the parties in conflict or difference,
as Power (@potestas@) over force (@potentia@). Instead,
political organization would focus on "the multitiude," working
from the grass-roots outward (rather than "up"), making
horizontal connections with other grass-roots groups rather than
forming hierarchical pyramids; these are already the strategies
of "autogestion" and "micropolitics" in France, "autonomia" in
Italy (of which Negri was a prominent spokesperson and
theoretician), "direct," "radical," or participatory democracy
and coalition politics in the United States -- all of which are
profoundly suspicious and critical of "representative" politics
in both its institutional and theoretical forms, and construe the
State as itself a terrain of immanent struggle among, rather than
the transcendent, synthetic mediation of, conflicting social
forces.
(27)Finally and most importantly, a Spinozan-Marxist politics
would reject all forms of teleologism. For there can be no
guarantee -- Hegelian or Hegelian-Marxist -- that "history" is
"on our side," that the development of Spirit or of marketable
productive forces will necessarily (or even probably) lead to the
realization of human freedom. Instead, political struggle would
have to asssume the -- far greater -- burden of realizing freedom
immediately, everywhere and for everybody, with whatever level of
productive force is available (a stance that does not, of course,
preclude augmenting human-natural productive force as *part* of
the struggle, as long as the former remained subordinate to the
latter). We would have to relinquish the complacent, even
mystical, Hegelian faith that "history always progresss, even if
on its bad side," that is, by means of disasters rather than
accomplishments -- disasters which by dialectical sleight of hand
(negation of the negation, ruse of reason) will someday turn out
to have been beneficial in the long run. (At the rate we are
going, humanity simply *doesn't have* a "long run" in which to
redeem the disasters spawned by capitalism's exclusive focus on
marketable productive force: in such a long run, which is
becoming shorter by the day, *we would all be dead*.) In the
final analysis, what is Hegel-inspired "dialectical" history
applied to capitalism, if not the 19th-century myth of progress
with the naive optimism replaced by a lofty, tragic sensibility
willing to sacrifice the present to its eventual redemption in an
indefinite (and increasingly unlikely) future?
(28)History thus shorn of Hegelian-dialectical teleologism would
not, however, be bereft of any shape or direction whatsoever.
The (non-dialectical?) laws of capitalist development diagnosed
by Marx still apply: the tendency of capital to accumulate and
concentrate, of the rate of profit to fall, of the market to
expand geographically (as well as intensify psychologically), of
commodity-production (and -consumption) to subsume greater and
greater expanses of social life, of economic growth to entail
periodic crises of over-production/under-consumption, and so on.
Capitalism as a mode of production, that is to say, remains
profoundly *contradictory*, in these and other ways {ftnt
instrumental vs emancipatory rationality, etc.}, and these
contradictions (or at least some of them) constitute indeed the
*motor of history*; but they are no longer to be construed as
*dialectical* contradictions, destined for synthesis/resolution
at some shining moment in the future. Capitalism develops
contradictorily, to be sure, but without any negativity: both its
tendencies and its counter-tendencies are actual forces, locked
in an antagonism of which only the entirely positive relations of
force, and not some negation of the negation, will determine the
outcome. History is in this light *not* the "history of class
struggle" (as Marx once said); nor is it the dialectic of forces
and relations of production (as he is also known to have
suggested) -- because nothing except the magical thinking of
teleologism can assure us that either of these two will ever come
into decisive (i.e. revolutionary) contradiction leading
dialectically to resolution. For a Spinoza-inspired Marxism,
history is merely the history of capitalism as a mode of
production; and its motor, for better and for worse, is the on-
going self-expansion of capital itself: history *without* a
subject, whether a class subject (the proletariat) or a
transcendental one (species-being).
(29)In addition to contributing to the intellectual viability of
Marxism, abandoning the last vestiges of teleologism might well
make Marxists seem less remote from other activists, for we would
no longer be able to justify tolerating non-capitalist crimes
against humanity in the name of some inevitable progress toward
world communism as the *eventual* and *complete* negation of
capitalism's negation of all humanity: for Spinozan Marxists, the
only certifiable historical tendency is for capitalism to expand
and intensify (with all the contradictions that entails); and it
is up to us, the multitude -- without the confident crutch of
"inevitable," much less the complacent, tragic sense of
"dialectical," historical "progress" -- to see that is doesn't go
unchallenged, by insisting first and foremost on the realization
for all of whatever degree of freedom the already-given level of
productive force makes possible. We would become less forgiving
of any and all iniquity ... and thereby belie any and all charges
of complicity.
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