Date: Tue, 4 Nov 1997 20:21:12 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: Post-Marxism and Paleo-Marxism



Leo here exemplifies the sort of rationale for post-marxism effectively
critiqued by Geras in Discourses of Extremity or Ellen Wood in The Rereat
>From Class. He identifies Marxism with an extreme, rigid, and implausible
historical determinism and a narrowly reductionist insistence that
everything is class; he imputes to Marxism an a priori histirical method
that begs every question and resaons in a dogmatic manner from first
principles, and then says he's not a MArxist because he rejects all that.
Well, I'm a Marxist and I reject all that too. So where does that leave us?

I suspect that what's going on here is that Leo has a  more fundamental
doubt. He thinks the workers are incapable of making revolution. Where
this pessimism comes from in his case I cannot guess from what he's said.
I am intermittently attracted to it myself, partly on the grounds of
personal experience and the facts of American history, partly because
there are powerful theoretical arguments--not the ones Leo invokes--to
doubt it. Nonetheless I think that if the workers cannot do it, no one
can, and if they cannot, we are doomed. So I try not to dwell on that and
(like Leo) spend my time trying to enhance the fighting power of the
organized working class. 

On Tue, 4 Nov 1997, LeoCasey wrote:

> Justin writes: 
> << One basic reason I'm still a Marxist and not an ex-Marxist or
>  post-Marxist is that I agree with Jim that Marx correctly identified the
>  working class as the social basis for socialism, the group with the

Leo:> 
> better society, or socialism. I would also say along these lines that when I
> found that I could no longer sustain these premises, intellectual honesty
> required me to admit that my theoretical trajectory as a heterodox, Gramscian
> Marxist had carried me out of the Marxist tradition.
> 
> >From my point of view, the problem is at least as much how the Marxist
> tradition conceptualizes class and the working class, as the central and
> primary role it gives to both.

Well, there isn't one way "the Marxist tradition" conceptualizes class.

 What I can not accept,
> however, is the idea that there are immanent laws of social development which
> in the era of captialism lead -- not necessarily in a direct or simple way,
> but still, "in the final instance", do lead -- to the emergence of a working
> class-for-itself, a class conscious proletariat, which then constructs
> socialism. 

Is this a problem with class analysis, or Marxist notions of the working
class, or is it not really rather a problem with a certain conception of
historical materialism? One indeed that not all Marxists accept,a s a
matter of fact.

A caricature of this reason for giving up Marxism might be: well, what you
have to say about class domination and the irrationality of capitalism is
very well, but if you can't give me a guarantee that the downfall of
acpitalism is inevitable and must take place in a certain way, roughly on
the pattern of, say Petrograd 1917, then I will have no truck with it.

It's true that some people think--Isaiah Berlin, for one, and his view is
not to be lightly disregarded, that Marxism without the escatology is
empty, I think it was often if not always important to Marx. It has been a
curiously Calvinist source of spiritual comfort to Marxists in hard times.
But I think it is dispensible.

We lose nothing of the logical structure of Marx's argument about the
potential of thew orking class as a revoluntionary force within capitalism
if we cionvert all the necessity claims to possibility ones (and we gaina 
great deal in term sof plausibility). As to the myth of the universal
applicability of Petrograd 1917, that was a Bolshevik myth and isn't an
integral part of Marxism in general. Nothing in Marxism requires workers
to follow the schema in the Manifesto, uniting in trade unions, then in
revolutionary political parties organized around class, then to take
state power in the name of the class. What Marxism requires is rather that
the working class become revolutionary because of its class interests and
strive to implement those interests through a program that includes,
centrally, the abolition of private property.  

I would argue that notions of immanent historical laws are the
> traces of Hegelian idealism, 'turned on its feet', in Marxism, and I give much
> more weight to historical contingency.

As do I. But so, I think, does Marx, when he's being careful, and Marxists
need not do otherwise.

 History is explicable, but not by
> reference to universal laws of historical development.

As you know, Leo, there is or has been a lively debate in Marxism about
whether Marxism offers these. Likcas, for one, though Marxism was a theory
of capitalism only.

 The 'leading role' of
> the working class is thus, for me, not a theoretical presupposition, but an
> empirical question which can only be answered in the specific contexts of
> particular conjunctures in particular social formations. 

I agree. And as an empirical matter I see no other group or set of groups
with the social weight, the anticapitalist interests, and the potential
capitalicity to transcend capitalism. The working class cannot do this on
its own, but if the working class is not moved to do it, it will not be done.

The point at which I
> break with Gramsci and the Marxist tradition is on the implicit premise that
> only social classes can organize political hegemony (and by deduction, that in
> the capitalist era, only the working class can organize a democratic or
> progressive hegemony)

I'm not sure what this means. I guess by hegemony you mean broad consent
based on a conception of the world and on compromise with other social
groups to a sort of leadership. I suppose I don't think that even Marx
that was true. He has the noton of Bonapartism, on which a state can
develop that sort of hegemony in circumstances of class deadlock. But I
suppose the rael question is not whether we argue deductively from the
premises that only t classes can exercise hegemony and that the working
class is the only progressive class to the conclusion that only the
working class can organize a progressive hegemony. Such a rigidly a priori
method is foreign to Marxism as I understand it. The real question is can
the working class do this and if not the working class, then who can?

 -- while a developed social class clearly can perform
> such a function, I see no reason to assume, prior to a study of the actual
> historical circumstances, that only a social class can do so.
> 

I make no such assumptions. On the basis of your studies of theactual
historical circumstance, who is your candidate?

> I also would argue that the Marxist framework for understanding social class
> and working class development has severe limitations for understanding the
> actual processes going on around us, and for fashioning our interventions.

I'd like to hear about this.

> This is a long topic by itself, but let it suffice to say that Hegelian
> notions of classes-in-themselves and for-themselves, separations of social
> being and consciousness, do not, IMO, take us very far.

Somuch for E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobawm,
the old Eugene Gevonese, Robert Brenner,  and other second raters, eh?

 The most interesting
> labor history today, again IMO, takes the form of applying discourse analysis
> of various sorts to the study of different working classes at different points
> in history. 

In the manner of the lately unlamented Francios Furet, who tells us on the
basis of discourse analysis that the French revolution never happened?

Further, my attraction to Gramsci was rooted in, among other
> things, the ways in which I could use his conceptual framework to think
> through actual political interventions in given conjunctures; I don't think
> that Marxism is very good at this task, 

So much for Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Ho, Fidel, and other failures. It's true
that Marxists haven't done so well in the advanced West. On the other hand
who has done better? I mean, of the people on our side. I myself find
Marxism a useful guide. It explains why when the business establishment
lines up behind something we had better oppose it. It makes clear that the
DEmocratic Party is a dead end for people interested in human liberation.
It puts us on the right side of anti-imperialist and anti-racist
struggles. It doesn't tell us how to magically make the working class
revolutionary, but it does tel us who we have to help become
revolutionary. What's your alterantive?

and I don't believe that this is just
> because Marx never got around to the issue in Capital before he died.
> 
No, I think he canvassed the ground pretty thoroughly before taht. There
was and is still a lot tobe said.