A MEMORY OF MARXISM

Paul Smith

[From Polygraph 6/7 (1993)]

It seems a little uncanny to be trying to talk about the future of anything
like Marxism right now; perhaps Marxism is the least likely of all things to
be authorized to talk of its future at a moment when so much of leftist
politics and the analyses of culture and capital to which such politics
relates are everywhere under the obligation to die--or to be dead already.
Working in concert with this pressure is the fact that it's no longer all that
simple (though, of course, it never really was) to know what we're talking
about exactly when we say Marxism. At this juncture do we talk about some
world-historical power that's now been defeated by its own flaws and/or by its
detractors and ideological antagonists? Would we be talking about some future
of that particular form of communism which has been abandoned by its
proponents in at best an unseemly rush, and at worst with an abject
abdication, and which has bequeathed us the mess of the former Yugoslavia,
rendered Honecker a criminal, and elevated the drunken and monomaniacal
Yeltsin to the status of a hero of democracy? The future of Marxism has, quite
apparently, been coupled with and dismissed in the same moment as things such
as these. Or are we talking about a Marxism that, in its many different
formations, is a crucial political component in southern Africa, or in India,
or indeed still in Cuba and scattered across Latin America, or even in the
Mediterranean countries of the E.C.? Perhaps, too, a Marxism that subsists in
the contemporary programmes and historical legacies of the social democratic
left in most of the industrial countries of the North? Or perhaps all we could
talk about is that construction so glibly dubbed by Perry Anderson, Western
Marxism, with its sinecures in the capitalist academies?

The popular construction here in the United States, of course, is that the
political concepts, theoretical ideas, and historical methodologies of Marxism
should be regarded as absolutely coterminous with the collapse of Soviet and
Eastern Bloc communism. This, evidently, is a massive obstacle to the future
or even to the imagination of Marxism--at least in this place where, of
course, it has never really been imagined anyway. And now, around the world,
and despite the rumour of its demise, history keeps putting the boot in.
Alongside the birth of all kinds of mickey-mouse free-market systems (in
places where, we're confidently told, people prefer poverty, injustice, and
ethnic clash to what they had before), a whole array of the possible referents
for the capacious category Marxism-communism-socialism is everywhere seen to
be dying (and sometimes literally dying)--from the Parti Socialiste in France,
to Chris Hani, to western theoretical Marxism, and so on. The claim that
Marxism has shown itself not just ineffectual but dangerous, irrational, and
morally bankrupt is of course the mystification of a hugely popular
common-sense syllogism here: democracy is good; totalitarianism is bad;
therefore capitalism is good and communism is bad. And by a further
mystification Marxism is conflated here with "communism as we have known it."

All this is obvious of course, but no less of a problem for that.

In this sort of context, then, it mightn't be much use to speak too loudly
about the future. But on the other hand it's simply too difficult to accept
that people elsewhere in the world who've ever dreamed, seen, lived, or even
just registered any kind of socialism or its impulses--from
liberal-parliamentary socialism, to armed Marxist struggle, to repressive
Balkan communism--have to become amnesiac and indiscriminate. That's to say,
the memory of something that is not capitalism might still turn out, in the
future, to be as much a driving principle as any future perfect. In the former
GDR, for instance, the creative destructive effects of unification have
paradoxically thrown the legacy of a communist social system in people's faces
once more, reminding them of the scale and efficacy--indeed, the necessity and
the humaneness--of at least some of the social and civic givens of the
communist system. (The huge stirrings we've seen from a renewed German labour
movement since unification are no doubt an expression of this, for example.)
Similarly in the struggle against Yeltsin, it's clearly not the supposedly
embedded and obdurate habits of power hungry party loyalists that manage to
keep support for communism at high levels. Or even in the former Yugoslavia,
the presence of strong left sentiment in all of the new states (and especially
the leadership roles of leftist parties in Macedonia and Slovenia) can be read
as the optimistic sign of a certain memory. It's possible, then, to imagine
that the residues of something associated with Marxism might still remain to
haunt the crisis-riddled system that thinks to have killed it off forever;
possible to imagine that some of the best ideas will remain when people
remember that they've traded one set of chains for another.

At the same time, it would be obviously too complacent just to wait and see,
or to depend upon some historical inevitability here, and irresponsible to
expect it all to happen elsewhere. And besides, it's been a core component of
Marxism's ideological burden to try to imagine the better, non-capitalist
world, and that still needs to be considered. But it does seem to be the case
that the force of the utopian elements of Marxism--however inspirational these
might often have been--has tended to fail miserably in the context of a mode
of production whose history is so intimately tied to instrumental rationality;
where, to put it another way, "theory" has been so drastically submitted to
the function of providing models either with their hypothesis or their proof.
Theory's utopian moment is, then, perhaps not Marxism's most effective weapon.
And such a realization or conviction has, I would guess, underpinned much of
the theoretical problematic of the last couple of decades, especially in the
U.S. context where, obviously, the memory of Marxism isn't strong or even
strongly appealing. 

I'm not exactly wanting to argue against the utopian aspect of Marxist
thought; I'm merely suggesting that, for all kinds of reasons, its work is
perhaps less useful at this juncture than the effort to secure radical modes
of analysis at a moment where these could seem to be in disarray and where
they're suffering beneath the weight of the ideological conviction that
they're dead or dying. The leftist response to what, then, amounts to a kind
of submersion of Marxism has been various. One possible way to go has been
with the likes of Judith Williamson who, in response to the post-1989
situation, tried to pose the question of "what to call communism now that it
no longer exists, but is still necessary." The necessity she sees in communism
is that "communism, like fairness, is a moral concept"--that is, the
fundamental principles of communism are crucial to the conduct even of
capitalist states. Even though I can't imagine that Williamson is here
pointing exactly to the future of Marxism, in the current conjuncture no
theoretical purist or old-gardist is going to persuade me that this is not a
feasible rhetoric for the left to be deploying. It's akin (in some of its
assumptions and aims, if not in its context) to a rhetoric like Jesse
Jackson's in the U.S. that makes the case for social, economic and racial
justice as a moral issue, but without the sobriquet communism/Marxism to scare
off the sensitive punter. At a less rhetorical and more academic level, it
seems that the left has opted in a widespread way for a theoretical
counterpart. Thus we have "post-marxism," a theoretical phenomenon that could,
in a rough rendering, be said to have shifted attention away from the
structural and historical nature of capitalism, and towards the more morally
valent signifiers of democracy and civic life. This move is perhaps summed up
for many in Laclau's and Mouffe's argument for resistant articulations around
what are always already signifiers with a signification that is essentially
moral--the signifier they concentrate on is "rights." Again, this can be a
feasible theoretical move, as would be any theoretical development that could
help both diversify and disseminate (even at the cost of disguising for a
while) what we might aptly call the ethos of Marxism. 

There are other ways to go, of course, in response to the continuing abasement
of the left. For instance, in a newspaper article in the immediate aftermath
of the French socialists' defeat in March 1993, one Jean Viard tried to
contextualize the drubbing they received at the ballot-box. He suggests that
it marks the end of "progress," the end of the mythical Enlightened narrative
that had featured the tropes of a domination of the natural and a faith in
fair distribution of the benefits of scientific and technological discovery.
Viard seems aware of the historically rather mixed ethical value of this
"progressive" faith that constituted the boots the French socialists have died
in, but he tends nonetheless to mourn it since the new alternative seems in
itself a kind of defeatism: the task of the present for the left, he suggests,
becomes the contained task of the pragmatic management of what's already
there. Whatever possibilities reside there he poses as the difference between
"yesterday, dreaming of transforming the world; and today, learning to live in
it." 

Or else: in what's a vaguely analogous kind of passage in a different context,
Andrew Ross argues for a "renewal of futurism": "Our visions of future
'freedom' will have to be fiercely conscious of limits." Ross repeats Viard's
sense that the Marxist tradition was (past tense) caught up in the ideology of
the domination of nature and so on, and suggests that the new alternative is
not exactly the post-technocratic management that Viard envisages, but still a
version of learning to live here. But Ross sketches a more optimistic project
(by my lights anyway) wherein the surrender to limits is accompanied by an
extension of the politics of the social individual and the politics of the
body, folded into a primary concern for environmental and ecological issues.

The above are all good-faith ways of conceiving and recommending resistance;
and each exemplifies in its way a shift of emphasis in radical politics that
is extremely crucial to recognize, support, and actively join. Even though
we're not looking at a change in the mode of production quite, nor even
necessarily at the end of an era, or still less at the end of history, it
seems nonetheless that something important has changed and that the historical
and structural analysis of capitalism that Marxism certainly constitutes is at
least now unpopular--amongst academics, activists, "the public," and all. Iris
Marion Young lays out some good part of what's at stake here in a paper in
which she takes account of the new theories of civil society being elaborated
in response to the radical disillusionment with Marxism's emphasis on the
state and the economy. She describes the "new" politics of civil society,
organized around "public voluntary association," and consisting in the
practical enactment of the kind of "articulations" and antagonisms that Laclau
and Mouffe theorize: the most present example would perhaps be the recent
lesbigay march in Washington in April 1993. Young is clear that this form of
politics is both radical and efficacious and she shows how it both differs
from liberal politics and corresponds to her own experience of radical
politics in this country over the last decades. But her paper also introduces
a serious interrogatory note suggesting that "neither the theory nor the
practice of civil society address the possibility of changing structural
relations of power and control over resources." 

So somewhere between the heady renewal of futurism and the dull default
position of the efficient management of everything that exists there might
nonetheless arise the whole series of knotty problems chronically the domain
of Marxist analysis and critique. It's a matter, so far as I can see, of
guaranteeing the position of a double look--toward the management of what we
live in and toward the expansion of rights; but at the same time, the emphasis
on the politics of rights and of the body (along with their considerably more
inane cousin, the currently trendy obsession with consumer culture or what
Ross disparagingly calls the "magna carta of consumerism") can only ever be
partial. That is, a radical political culture whose central mechanism of
antagonism is probably a petitioning relation to the state has limited
prospects in long-term and large-scale struggle against the forces of the
state and capitalism that are the designated audience for such petitions. The
politics of the new civil society is not yet concentrating on, or often much
concerned with, what I take to be a necessary theorizing of the procedures and
consequences of such a petitionary relation. Such theorizing might have to
come (I hope) from the quarter of a thing we might call Marxism, where
discovery and exposure of effective orders of determination in culture and
society are still the task at hand and where a pragmatic politics might still
claim a theoretical and analytical dimension directed at structural
transformation.

So, moral Marxism, civil society, the politics of the body, generalized
radicalism; these are all part of the present conjuncture and will be of the
future. But at the same time, we are being offered as a fait accompli the
triumph of capitalism, and we should perhaps be listening--Marxism is, after
all, fundamentally constituted upon the analysis of capital. The supposed
triumph of this mode of production has done nothing to change the fact that
capitalism is an unjust system whose ambition is global and whose effects are
devastating for the majority, especially now for those outside the
military-industrial-medical-sports complexes of the North. Even within the
encratic North, of course, it's the case that, however many resistant readers
of popular cultural texts you might find, you'll also find that each of them
is purchasing a commodity within the productive-consumptive circuit Marx
described--money-commodity-money--and that each of them is a representative of
alienated labour. In that sense, there's still a lot of work to be done by a
Marxism whose emphases derive from the analysis of production. More
specifically, the necessity remains of understanding the relations amongst the
varying and variable material elements of culture, the nature of the commodity
and its displacement into imaginary relations, and so on. 

The relations of determination amongst the various levels, registers, and
kinds of social and cultural life still seem, then, a necessary analytical
object if we are to make the case for a fundamentally different social order.
Such analysis is also the crucial base for understanding the possibilities of
a future radicalism--it's not even enough to simply register the sheer
complexity and overdetermination of the current conjuncture, but we need to be
able to recognise the real effects and the real determinants and the real
possibilities of that complexity. A crucial component here is the continued
examination of the commodity form, its intendments and its social relations.
The commodity is still the hieroglyph standing in real ways largely
unconsidered at the center of a whole periphery of current theoretical work
and scholarship that often seems almost desperately centripetal. I don't, of
course, mean to install the mysterious commodity as the deepest and
transcendent mystery of our cultures; but I do mean to say that it is a
privileged place for the beginning of analysis in that, if this commodity
could speak, part of what it would profer is a memory of the process of the
extraction of labour and the production of surplus-value (it's hard to
suppress one's horror that this is seen by so much cultural analysis as in
some drastic way irrelevant). Through the commodity, the linkage between the
production of value and the production and dissemination of values is still on
the books, as far as I can tell; as is the question of ideology, or of the
intendments of the commodity (the commodity-text). And, so as not to lose the
point of all this, it's important to recall that such forms of analysis are
historical, recognizing the place of commodities and subjects in the context
of a particular mode of production which is, when all's said and done, still
the enemy. 

So, all of this is not quite to say that the future of Marxism is its present
exactly; but it is to say that some element of the future of Marxism (and not
just of Marxism) must surely be in the radical analytical tasks that are still
at hand (and they are still at hand not because they've never been undertaken
but because their formulations continue in relation to a continuing history,
in our case the continuing history of capitalism). Nor do I want to to install
or reinstall the old phenomenon to which non-Marxists or anti-Marxists seem to
react particularly badly: Marxist economic determinism. Rather, I simply want
to stress the continuing importance of the kind of investigation that Raymond
Williams had sketched out in the following way during his own attempt at
"futurology" in the early eighties: 

 The cultural analysis developed within and beyond Marxism in the last sixty
 years has rejected the idea of specialist 'areas' of society, each served by
 its specialist 'discipline.' It is a central achievement of this analysis
 that it has developed forms of attention to a whole social order without any
 dogmatic assignment of priority to this or that determining force.

One might want to add to Williams's proposition here that, pace the many
detractors of Marxism's analyses and political urges, such an attention to the
multiple forces of the "whole social order" hasn't chronically precluded
attention to the different constituents and constituencies. It's hard in the
present context to tell that to someone who has in their mouth the shibboleth
of the "collapse of the grand-narratives" or the watchword of Marxism's
"totalizing" urge. The intellectual equivalent to the normative popular
discourses of the post-Cold War is the charge against Marxism's blind
insistence on "the production of a unified class, gender, people, or race as a
social agent." The writer quoted here as no more than an symptomatic voice,
Tony Bennett, goes on to complain that such an urge has chronically operated
as "a death trap for practical thinking" and inhibits the "development of more
specific and immediate forms of political calculation and action likely to
improve the social circumstances and possibilities of the constituencies in
question." He recommends that, instead of such dastardly politics, we talk and
work "with what used to be called the ISAs rather than writing them off from
the outset and then, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, criticizing them again
when they seem to affirm one's direst functionalist predictions." What might
once have been called the "opportunism" of this kind of politics not only
forgets that such pragmatic tasks and strategies have always been carried out
on the left; but appears also to forget what I've been referring to as the
structural enemy--capitalism itself. 

Indeed, a major strength of the kind of politics and cultural analysis that
Williams described above, and to the development of which he was always a
major contributor, is that it has worked its way through many of the issues
Bennett alludes to. And it has done it in many different ways. Arguably, the
weaknesses of Marxist analysis have not been a function of its supposed
monolothicism and universalism. That is, Marx's own thinking was flexible and
capacious enough to account for--indeed was based upon--the contingency and
variability of struggle. That seems to me the power of his insistence that
classes are what are formed in struggle, not what pre-exist struggle. Rather,
the weaknesses have been along the lines of a difficulty in the project of
understanding the historical meaning of the complexity of determinations and
effects in culture and society. Indeed, this is the kind of weakness that
Williams identifies as he continues with the passage I quoted above:

 Yet what is often weak in this kind of analysis is that while it shows
 interactions, interconnections, even underlying structural forms, it usually
 cannot succeed in establishing, with any certainty, the real order of
 determination between different kinds of activity. That there always is such
 an order of determination cannot be doubted, from the historical evidence,
 though that it is not always the same order is equally clear. This is the
 necessary theoretical base for the recognition of genuinely different social
 orders. 

What Williams might have intended by that phrase, "the recognition of
genuinely different social orders," is both crucial and a little ambivalent.
Crucial in the sense that it rightly takes for granted Marxism's commitment to
opening the way to difference; the phrase is itself a recognition of Marxism's
desire for such social orders. On another hand, it could also suggest in a
more utopian way that the future is, as it were, already there for the
recognition, for the discovery. I'm more comfortable with the first
understanding than the second--but perhaps I'm just reading into Williams's
phrase my own (contextual) discomfort with the utopian in Marxism.

Be that as it may, Williams's words can be held up as an astute summary of
Marxism's current and continuing commitments, its understanding of its tasks,
its desire--its project, in short. So if I've said little here about exactly a
future for Marxism, it's because some of the central problematics of what
could feasibly be called Marxism's memory (its desire for new social orders,
its attempts to grasp and transform of the complexity of relations and
determinations within capitalism, and the paramount importance its gives to
the continually shifting "hieroglyphic" form of the commodity) have not lost
their relevance for me. Marxism's past (and indeed its understanding of
history) lives in the present; and even if that might inhibit the thinking of
a model or set of models for the future, that's perhaps not altogether a bad
thing. The presence of memory amid the complex tasks of the present indeed
constitutes (will constitute) a project, and that's perhaps as much of a
future as needs be defined.