Date: Sun, 9 Nov 1997 10:30:54 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: Post-Marxism and Paleo-Marxism



I seem to have irritated Leo into uncharacteristic unfairness, which I
regret. Perhaps it's just that he doesn't want to discuss Marxian class
theory, a topic he raised in his comment on postmarxism. He says he
doesn't care to persuade others to share his post-Marxist views, a comment
that mystifies me in the context of this list. Presumably he thinks his
views are right--given Leo's proclivities I avoid saying "true"; I don't
know whether Leo believes that statements have truth value. Some
postmarxists don't. But certainly since he rejects Marxism as he
understands it he must think there are some sort of criteria for
evaluating beliefs. Now in a practical political context too often follow
Leo's principle of seeking common ground with others and not attempting to
persuade my coworkers to be Marxists, at least where that would be futile
or destructive of cooperation. But this is the Marxism-theory list, where
we subscribe to discuss which views are right and why.  

Leo really responds to none of my concrete points.

I asked: If the working class cannot be the agent for socialist
transformation, who can? Leo says he thinks the working class alone can't
do it. I agree and so did Marx, as did every other important Marxist. It
will be recalled that the hammer and sickle stands for the _smychka_, the
union of workers and peasants, for example. So unless Leo is attacking the
straw man that only the working class _alone_ can make revolution, we have
no disagreement nor anything that takes us outside the narrowest orthodox
Marxism. I suppose that Leo does think that the working class is capable
of political action, or he wouldn't be trying to organize in it. But he
didn't respond to my challenge by saying if not the working class (alone)
then who. 

But perhaps Leo thinks that the concept of the working class is fatally
flawed--I'm just guessing on the basis of his attacks on Marxist
conceptions of class. He works with labor education, but maybe doesn't see
that as working to organizer the working class. Perhaps it's just a matter
of trying to build a coalition between the organized labor movement and
some other groups, whatever these may be. Is that right Leo?

And I suspect from Leo's rejection of the prospect of revolution and of
the reform-revolution dichotomy that whatever he thinks the working class,
or organized labor, or whatever, is a capable of, it's not revolution. So
despite his taking umbrage at my suggestion that he thinks the workers
cannot make a revolution--a notion I do not think is foolish--I suspect
that is exactly what he he thinks. Now just why he thinks this and what it
amounts to is not clear to me. It might be mean that he thinks that we
will never replay Petrograd 1917 in the advanced capitalist countries. I
think that is probably right. It might be on the other hand that we cannot
get rid of capitalism, all we can do is open more democratic space within
it. I believe that is wrong but it is the practical import of Leo's
rejection of revolution.

I wish he would clear this stuff up so I would not have to keep guessing
at what he means.

As I have made clear in a previous post, I think there are very strong
arguments that the working class--as conceived by Marx--may lack the
interest and the capability to making revolution in the sense of getting
rid of capitalism. I do not accept these arguments, but I wish I had
better replies to them. My arguments are based not on discourse analysis
or anything of that sort but on a combination of rational choice arguments
and history.  I'd like to hear what Leo thinks of these arguments and what
anyone else does. 

Leo says:

>With ]respect to the power and capacity of > working people, my position is
> simply what I stated originally: I do not see > them as the ONLY social
> agent capable of leading fundamental social change. > When -- and if --
> you give up the poetic eschatology of the 'riddle of > history solved',
> there is no reason, other than disembodied faith in a > messiah of the
> past who has no meaning in a disenchanted present, to insist > that only
> the 'working class' can perform that role.

Leo attacks a straw man here. As I have said, I do not believe that the
working class is the only force capable of leading fundamental social
change. But I note that it does not follow, as Leo seems to think it
does, that if we reject that proposition that we have to say that the
working class cannot make a revolution, or that if we want "fundamental
social change" (by which Leo apparently means something other than
revolution, though what he means he does not say) that we can do it without
the working class. It does not even follow that the working class must not
play a leading role with respect to its allies in such a transformation.

Leo says that there is no reason but a sort of irrelevant nostalgia for
red flags in giving the working class any special role at all if we give
up the eschatology of the riddle of history solved. This is foolishness.
The reason for giving the working class a  special role is that it has a
special position in society as matter of empirical fact and theoretical
analysis. It is uniquely placed in the production process to be able to
stop the capitalist system. It is numerically the majority, if we
understand it to be the group that labors for wages because it lacks
productive property. It has an interest in getting rid of capitalism
because only that will end its special oppression, exploitation. It has at
various times in the past actually shown revolutionary potential
actualized. We can accept all that while regarding socialism as merely
possible. 

I also asked why Leo thinks that Marxism has to be stuck with strong and
implausible claims of necessity in historical development and with a
crudely reductionist class analysis. I myself do not accept the
propositions that socialism is inevitable, that history must proceed
through a rigid series of stages, that social change must take a certain
form (in particular, of classes so self-conceived struggling against each
other), and other claims associated with a mechanical version of
historical materialism. 

I think, rather, that the development of capitalism creates a class with
the potential capabilities and the long term interests in getting rid
of capitalism as well as creating the material wealth necessary to
transcend and supersede class altogether. In certain favorable
circumstances I think, or hope, that these potentials may be realized and
that the class interests of workers and others may cause them to transform
society into a socialist order. I think this is less rather than more
likely than not, but that it is our only hope. We do really face
Luxemburg's choice, Socialism or barbarism. 

As to class reductionism, I think that there are lots of identifications
and causal factors social factors that cannot be explained neatly be
class. I don't think that racism, for example, is "nothing but" a way to
divide the working class and is wholly explained by this (actual) function
that it has. I reject the proposition that whiteness, for instance, is
merely an ideological expression of bourgeois class dominance. Racism has
independent psychological, socio-cultural, and historical dynamics that
interact with class. But I do think that class is an essential variable,
that we cannot begin to understand our society or any society without
analysis of its class structure, and that class has a sort of explanatory
primacy, not in being the real cause or essence of everything, but in
providing the structural framework against which other factors operate.
This theory of the primacy of class is due to Milton Fisk in The State and
Justice (Cambridge 1989).

Leo accuses me of arguing from authority. If he looks again at my post he
will see that I cited Wood and Geras only as references, not capital-A
Authorities, for further reading in the sort of arguments that I
presented. I do not wholly agree with either his assessments of these
writers or with his notion that only classic texts, perhaps up to Gramsci,
are worth studying. 

As to the second, one reason I think that Marxist tradition is alive and
vibrant is that there are many contemporary writers doing superb work
developing Marxist ideas. As Leo knows, my main candidates for
commendation on the analytical Marxists, people like Roemer, Cohen,
Elster, Wright, Levine & Sober, etc. As Leo also knows, that hardly puts
me in the company of those who prefer to fiddle while Rome burns.

As to the first, Leo thinks Wood and Geras are rather dull second raters
blindly committed to orthodoxy and in the business of reassuring the
faithful that everything is OK despite the apparent crisis. This fits Wood
better than Geras, despite Leo's harsher assessment of Geras. While he is
not brilliant, he is exceedingly careful and solid; his demolition of the
insufferable and illiterate LaClau and Mouffe, to which I referred, is a
case in point. As for Wood, while I differ with her rather orthodox views,
I think that her general analysis of the postmarxist style of argument is
sound. But he is right we would be better off discussing substantive
arguments than debating the merits of various commentators. 

Leo continues to exemplify the pattern that Wood and Geras criticize in
various post Marxist writers, that of rejecting certain extreme and
implausible positions, characterizing these as coextensive with Marxism,
and then saying the implausibility of the positions is a reason to reject
Marxism itself.

For example, Leo says:

> passion. I have long since abandoned what I think is a fundamentally
> sectarian faith in the power of "correct" ideas to lead to "correct" politics
> to lead to "revolution". For a tradition such as Marxism, which places great
> stake on its 'materialism', this obsession with "correct" ideas (expressed in
> the fetish of the 'program') is the crudest of idealist practices.

OK, some Trotskyists have some such views. I don't and neither I think
does any other Marxist on this list. I do want to have "correct" or
anyway, true, ideas, although this is something I want quite independently
of Marxism. I think we all are better off with true ideas than false ones
and that true ideas are more likely to guide us to whatever goals we
have. I certainly do _not_ think that the correct line will galvanize the
working class and lead to revolution. 

Rather I hold the view, demonstrably held also by Marx--this is not an
appeal to authority but just an incidental side note--that the way we get
correct political ideas is by engaging in practical struggle and
reflecting on how the results of that struggle, its successes and
failures, require modifications in the framework with which we started.
With intellectual radicals, this will often be modification in explicitly
held theory. With working class people, it will often be a making explicit
of ideas that were not articulated as a conscious theory. 

It is certain that holding ideas, true or false, by itself will not lead to
revolution or anything else but the holding of ideas. For social change,
organization and action is required. That is elementary materialism, if
you want to give it a fancy name.


Or again Leo says:

> Insofar as E. P. Thompson has valuable things to > say about the
> development of the English working class, or Eugene Genovese > has insight
> into the culture of enslaved African-Americans, and I would never > deny
> that they do, it is in spite of, rather than because of, this Marxist >
> conceptual framework. The separation of objective and subjective, social >
> being and consciousness, upon which the theory is based, is simply not a >
> very, yes, dialectical way of conceptualizing the
> question.

This is like the move Geras and Wood criticize where, when postmarxists
find something that's not reductionist and determinist in Gramsci or
LUxemburg or Marx, they accuse these writers of being inconsistent. As Leo
should know, both these writers are wholly informed by class analysis. 
Their great value is in no small part in developing the notion of class.
Thompson is quite explicit that he rejects base-superstructure metaphors.
He regards class as a process, something that is made in part by the
conscious activity of the workers. But his polemic against the abstract
imposition of a priori notions of class is carried on within the Marxist
tradition. Gevonese is less deeply theoretical than Thompson, but his
deployment of Gramscian ideas of hegemony is both thoroughly Marxist in
viewing slavery as a class institution marked by struggle within the
framework of a mode of production and at the same time, resolutely
antireductionist.

A final note. Leo says:

question. Whatever the > contributions of figures such as <<Lenin,
Trotsky, Mao, Ho, Fidel>> which > Justin cites, and I am one who thinks
that the contributions of this > particular lot were largely negative,
especially in their embrace of > authoritarianism, I don't see how they
added anything to an understanding of > class.

Leo said that Marxist class analysis isn't much use in practical
interventions in history. Unless he wants to hold that these leaders'
professed adherence of Marxism was, like that of the historians he
disparages, incidental to their political success, I submitted them as
examples of people who deployed that analysis effectively to effect social
change. Their authoritarianism is irrelevant here. The point is that
whatever the ultimate effect of the changes they wrought, they were able
to bring them about in large part because of their use of Marxist class
analysis.

And by the way, as sheer _theoreticians_ of class, Lenin, Trotsky, and to
a lesser extend Mao, though not Ho or Fidel, are very considerable
figures. Lenin was a first rate social scientist, whatever else he was.
Trotsky was a historian of the first magnitude. This is not to say that I
agree with all their theoretical views, just that I appreciate their
caliber.  

--Justin