This is a summary for my blog friend at Great Lake Swimmer. The question was what has postmodernism done to change or re-arrange Marx’s theories? Some ideas have been surfacing lately that I want to share, albeit somewhat sloppily. The point I want to argue is that postmodernism hasn’t rejected Marx, and that Marxian ideas are ever still relevant today.
Who is Karl Marx in a postmodern era?
Karl Marx’s theory of capital is like a path in the woods. Every idea, every research program, is a path in the woods leading us (where? — somewhere) to a place we won’t know until we get there. Martin Heidegger wrote that speculative philosophy was like exploring a path in the woods — a hols vage. But would any particular path lead us to a promising vista for further exploration, or will it be a Lakatosian dead end? The path in the woods taken with Karl Marx’s ideas turned out to be a pivotal vista for the postmodern era. However, there are some confusing words being thrown about that I would like to clarify, explore, and criticize for being ahead of itself.
Post-Marxism
The postmodern paradigm thinks in terms of fragments, particulars, and chaotic heterogeneity. In the new Marxian intellectual climate it is popular to be what is called a “post-Marxist” — a camp which believes they reject the specter of Marx because they reject economic determinism, class-reductionism and Marxist essentialism.
The post-Marxist group consists of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Slavoj Zizek, Stanley Aronowitz, Alistair Davidson, Phillip Derbyshire, and David Forgacs, to name only a few. Rather than reject the specter of Marx, my point is they actually sharpen the Marxian dialectic, and strengthen the Marxian research program by adding layers study and meta-theorization — basically adding more to the body of Marxian thought. But the new intellectual climate presents us with two equally ridiculous options: Marxist orthodoxy or post-Marxism. But perhaps like the Situationists who preceded them they are still Marxists just as much as Marx was when he said, “I am not a Marxist.“
If the Marxian theory of capital is a working theory, then it should be changing if capital itself is changing. Theory should reflect every activity of human life if capital has colonized every activity of human life. This has already happened. Since the 1960s the top-down view of the base and superstructure was replaced by a more reflexive social relationship. The “spectacular society” in the words of Guy Debord is more dynamic, the lie that everyone is “an accomplice” to. (But Marx also hinted at this when he wrote of “false consciousness” and religion.) Post-Marxists like Slajov Zizek also weave Freudian, Jungian, and Lacanian psychoanalysis into the theory (also not incompatible with theories of antagonism or agonism.) And now of course harvesting the world for the new (digital) future is a (digital) class of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists for the wireless world — the virtual class as Athur Kroker describes in Data Trash and other books. This is a new class of people whose work breaks from the materiality of production, and speeds off into the virtuality of circulation.
So capitalism has changed. And naturally Marxian theory has changed with it.
How has the commodity changed? How has capital changed?
The commodity has also changed. Whereas in the manufacturing era the commodity-form was “one-sided” and “massive,” again quoting Kroker in The Will to Technology. In digital capitalism the new commodity is distinctly virtual — it is a vector not a magnitude. It is not one-sided. In economic terms, the commodity-form of virtual circulation is multiplicative infinitely with no marginal costs per unit. Economists today are busy calculating the implications of transaction cost effects in globalization and virtual markets. Even for Karl Marx, it was never really about capitalism as production, but capitalism as circulation.
What about economic determinism? Marx was, firstly, an economist and it was commonplace at the time to speak of “iron laws” in classical economic theory. David Ricardo used this language. But capital was always instead about “tendencies” which could be perverted by countervailing forces. As long as we are speaking of tendencies, we don’t have to worry about a silly problem such as economic determinism. Foucault, newer theories of agonism and antagonism, Agamben, etc. explain these countervailing forces.
What would warrant the title post-Marxist? I think it would really have to be a rejection of some crucial parts of Marxian theory, or we would have to live in a society which was no longer bound by some pretty fundamental constants in Marxian thought — such as capital or labor, or class altogether. If we lived in a classless society, but still had analyzed capital as Marxian pro-revolutionaries, I think we could be post-Marxists. Or something along those lines.
How has social antagonism changed?
The post-Marxism movement begins with the basic tenets of Marxian theory but moves away from the mode of production as the starting point for analysis to include factors other than class — such as gender, ethnicity, and biopower. New theories of class and social antagonism break with older models.
The point post-Marxists make is their break with the economic and material dimension to Marx. The aim is to bring the antagonistic dialectic to nearly every sphere of human activity, not just the material forces of production. But just as the commodity-form is present in every sphere of human activity (experiences, advertising, culture, etc.) so too the Marxian dialectic is present in every sphere of human activity (gender relations, psychology, literary theory, etc.) This is also the postmodern tendency. You can use Marx to talk about race, about gender, about social identity. You can use Marx to talk about social antagonism. You can combine Marx with Freud, or Marx with Nietzsche and Heidegger. Our social theory is plug-and-play.
Postmodernism is not merely limited to art, as I think it is usually understood, or just a trend in Continental philosophy: everything is postmodern in the postmodern era. The economics, the aesthetic, the culture, the biopower. The concept of biopower was realized in the postmodern era. Contemporary postmodern theory stresses a growing interconnectedness of markets, politics, and culture in a high-tech global village where information simultaneously penetrates the entire world, and all aspects of everyday life. The globalization of capital put capitalism everywhere on the geographical map, but the movement of the commodity puts capitalism everywhere in human experience, and even inside the human body. A paragraph from Arthur Kroker’s The Will to Technology,
Just as Marx prophesied in The Communist Manifesto, the unfettered movement of the commodity-form breaks beyond the strictly economic sphere to involve market penetration of every dimension of human experience, from electronically mediated subjectivity and processed (social) reations to the biogenetic engineering of human reproduction…
Use Value, Exchange Value, Sign Value
Have postmodern theorists rejected Marx?
Jean Baudrillard is probably the most Marxian (yet incidentally, post-Marxist) of the postmodern theorists, since he has done the most to improve upon Marx’s theory of capital in the original spirit of Marx and Engels.
Like other postmodernists, Baudrillard also rejected Marx. It was important for Baudrillard to criticize Marx in order to make a crucial point in The Mirror of Production and A System of Objects. But his new “sign value” theory, based partly on Saussurian semiotics, is undoubtedly true to the materiality of the Marxian legacy. (See my essay The Rehabilitation of Jean Baudrillard.)
Baudrillard was more than a footnote to Marx; he was an epic thinker like Marx who had a keen sense of the historical unfolding of capitalism, and whose specter of hyperreality/hyper-capitalism captured the imagination of a new (postmodern) intelligentsia. While Marx wrote the political history of material capital, Baudrillard was writing a kind of metaphysical history of virtual circulation. He has been revived through science fiction (such as David Cronenberg films, but many others) and dystopian animes (such as Ghost in the Shell.) Keanu Reeves was instructed to read Baudrillard’s Simulation et Simulacra for his role as “Neo” in The Matrix movies. Arthur Kroker again:
“Probably against his (political) intentions and certainly against his theoretical aspirations, [Marx] was always and only writing about the disappearance of capitalism into technology, the vanishing of a materialist theory of political economy into a metaphysics of the ‘value-form’ of capital — the pure code of technicity.”
In this Matrix-style reality, Marxian thought hovers over our commodity-forms.
How are Marx's ideas present in the cultural code?
Conclusion
Despite the rise of post-Marxist critical theory which breaks with Marx’s materialism, and in lieu of the collapsed pseudo-Marxist Soviet Empire and the end of history approach of mainstream thought, now that we’ve actually arrived at the 21st Century, we find Marx more relevant and more readable than ever. The specter of Marx has been waiting for us in the digital age this entire time, perhaps waiting for the virtual classes to open Das Kapital in the form of an e-book or download The Communist Manifesto onto a mobile phone and or any number of virtual media (online universities, for example.) We also find that you don’t need to have an orthodox materialist Marxism in order to use Marxian analysis as a tool. Just as Marx himself knew when he appropriated Hegel’s dialectical idealism into his own dialectical materialism.
When Das Kapital was first published in 1867 capitalism was very different. Marx and Engels wrote diatribes against bourgeois families who overworked their house-servants to death, and against the working conditions of children in coal mines. Conditions of production and circulation today are vastly different today. Globalization. Personal automobiles. The Internet. The Third World. Virtual Reality. A hundred years from now, capitalism will be even more different. We can’t say what it will look like but we can be sure it will be different. “There’s just no way of telling,” to echo the words of anarchist anthropologist David Graeber.
If we look at Marx’s body of thought through the Lakatosian framework — as a “research program” that either melts away under pressures from superior bodies of thought or perseveres as a viable research framework — then the majority of postmodern theory grew from appendices to Marx. Marx never disappeared. Today we have the web 2.0. Tomorrow we’ll have the digital noosphere or something else. This makes the specter of Marx even more relevant. Today we have post-Marxist cyborg feminists such as Donna Haraway. Tomorrow we will have the post-human? So the specter of Marx is even more relevant in my opinion. We are thresholding and the horizon is always receding, but the specter of Marx’s thought remains inadmissible.
Karl Marx statue in Chemnitz, Germany
yo i am sorry i havnt responded,but i am still adjusting for school. ill make sure i read and re-read your post and right a substantive response over the weekend. As far as your question concerning quebec sovereignty, I am seriously considering it, and will try and post something over hte weekend as well. Thanks for the link to my blog, and the dubstep recs. I am not sure if you know Wit, from unspeakable practices, unspeakable acts, but maybe we could try some sort of tri-blog event on some sort of text or something, to promote all of our blogs, but whatever man, it depends what you use yopur blog for.
take it easy
GLS
those sound like great ideas. When I have the time I would like to develop these ideas better and read anything you suggest.
david harvey’s course on capital sounds lile it would be worth my time — if you want to study it together or in a group I would be up for it.
-uob
Hi Lettrist,
Thought provoking piece! I’ve lately been thinking about a “cultural turn” in Marxist theory, but I would diverge slightly from your piece.
First, I think the “cultural turn” in Marxist thought was neither snychronous nor synonymous with the “cultural turn” of postmodernism. It occurred earlier, following the Bolshevik Revolution, but particularly in the ’20s in the work of Karl Korsch, Georg Lukacs and (most importantly) Antonio Gramsci, and in the ’30s in the work of the Frankfurt Institute – Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, etc. There was a lot of interaction, in fact between all of these figures, except Gramsci who was slowly wasting away in a fascist prison in Italy. They collectively took on the task of the critique of the Second International and of economism and other “determinisms” – both Marxist and bourgeois.
In the 1940s and 50s and 60s this was taken on (and in some ways further) by others, including (equivocally) Sartre, (importantly) Cornelius Castoriadis and the others of S. ou B., and by the Situationists – although the Frankfurt Institute was still producing important work, Lukacs still writing, etc etc., so they’re not entirely distinct.
We must also note the parallel developments of the avant-garde from the 1910s through to the ’30s (Surrealism, and Dada, Futurists, Constructivists, etc etc.), of Brecht (esp. in relation to Benjamin and Lukacs), of the Situationists, and of the counter-culture – all of which critiqued in various different ways the separation of culture from everyday life, or from social production, or from “the general mode of production”, or of high Art from low Culture, or of… …
This line of thought is then taken up and continues into the 70s, in opposition to the (second) “cultural turn” of postmodernism, in the work of Raymond Williams (for example) and others.
That is to say, there’s very little of worth that’s new about the “post-marxists”. And in fact, I think they are only of any worth in so far as they take on and continue this line of thinking so conveniently laid out for them. This includes the introduction of pschoanalysis into Marxism – the Frankfurts; the study of reification and simulacra – from Lukacs to Debord, and everyone in between; a rejection of determinist thinking, of ‘naturalisation’, of specialization and of positivism; and an emphasis on the importance of culture, language, etc. in the production of ‘hegemony’ – which is Antonio Gramsci’s special achievement. Moreover, I am suspicious of these post-marxists in so far as they forget this first “cultural turn” and conform to the second.
Anyway, these are just my thoughts so far – a few hypotheses. I’d be interested to hear what you think.
Best
Wit
I think you are correct that the intellectual atmosphere from the early 20th Century is better worth focusing on. I like the way you put it, that they follow a line so conveniently laid out for them.
if this group fits the definition of a post-Marxist ( critique of econ. determinism, ex g) then why are today’s post-Marxists worthy of such a name? To your knowledge were there any from the Frankfurt circles who criticized class-reductionism in favor of more dynamic factors?
This is a thoughtful response as always, Wit. I will have better access to internet soon and be able to write more of a response.
uob
Thanks Lettrist/UtopiaOrBust,
I think all of the people I mention critique economism and class-reductionism – although Lukacs had an equivocal “on-and-off” relationship with the Leninist tradition.
However, I think all of them understood (as you argue) that it is possible to “sharpen the dialectic” within the Marxist tradition, rather than having to necessarily abandon it. The first I know of any of them repudiating Marxism “altogether” is Cornelius Castoriadis in the early 1960s. However, I think his repudiation is chiefly polemical, in as much as, although he thoroughly critiques pretty much every aspect of Marxism, he is still consciously working in this tradition – a historical materialist, socialist tradition – and still advocating a socialist revolution. He’s very good and worth a read. Very influential on Debord too.
I think the reasons they don’t take up the term ‘post-marxism’ are mostly the reasons you argue in your piece!
Speak soon
Wit
I think you’re lumping together a number of thinkers here with pretty diverse, and even conflicting, relationships with Marxism. Zizek, for example, is a very different sort of thinker from the post-Marxists, in that he retains a conception of capitalism as a structured system which needs to be eliminated if any kind of livable life is to be possible. The post-Marxists have by and large jettisoned any concept of capitalism as a totality, and are much more comfortable talking about various sorts of intersecting oppressions. The debate between Laclau, Butler, and Zizek in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality draws this out pretty clearly.
More importantly though, it’s a pretty significant exaggeration to say that post-marxists didn’t reject Marx. The entire point of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is that socialism doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with working class self-activity. As Hal Draper has argued, the fusion of the socialist vision (which had been explored by any number of previous Utopian thinkers) with movement of the exploited majority was perhaps the single most important contribution of Marx’s thought. To break that connection implies a radical re-orientation away from all the points on which Marx focused his thought.
Thank you for commenting. Allow me some time to respond since I currently do not have internet. I included Zizek in this discussion of post-Marxist because I have read a few reviews and some introductions to his work which seem to place him in the post-Marxist “category”– however, if you’re right then it’s rather that he should be in the post-Marxist milieu or debate, but that he is not one of them. However, of the articles and books by Zizek I have read none really tackle the questions raised here about economic determinism or reductionism. So I’m not exactly clear what Zizek has to say about those things.
Well bugger me, if there isn’t a link to either/or/bored on utopia or bust. And now there’s one going the other way!
This looks like a really good post. I say ‘looks’ cuz i just scrolled through it minutes before i have to go to work. I’m totally gonna blog the fuck out of this tonight!