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Intellectual Marxism comes in various forms and flavors. Those inspired by the so-called “early Marx” of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Fromm, 1961; Marx, 1844) may unleash devastating philosophical critiques of alienation under capitalism that inspire quests for emancipation comparable to those championed by mid-twentieth-century existentialists and anarchists of any era. In the alternative, those preoccupied with the “mature” Marx of Das Kapital may focus on the macroeconomics of then-emerging industrial society and seek to apply the principles of “scientific” socialism,” “dialectical materialism” and “economic determinism” to historical patterns and processes. Common to both, as well as to those who insist on the philosophical continuity between the “humanistic” and the “scientific” Marx, is the critical thread of “class conflict.”
Apart from the embarrassments caused by the appropriation of “Marxism” as the official ideology of such authoritarian states as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics under Stalin, the People’s Republic of China under Mao, and a number of failed “third-world” experiments, the primary problem of Marxism in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first has been its inability to account for the failure for the industrial working classes in advanced nations (notably the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany) to fulfill their appointed mission to overthrow their capitalist oppressors. Instead, they seem to have been softened by the success of the “welfare state,” seduced by “consumerism,” occasionally lured into right-wing “populism” and in extremis into “fascism,” often distracted by nationalism, commonly diverted into the racial, religious and gendered resentments of “identity politics,” and everywhere reduced to alienated individualism with neither the wit nor the will to engage in revolutionary working class politics (Jay, 2018). Some people on the putative left—most obviously the pessimistic critical theorists of the original Frankfurt School (e.g., Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer) and any number of subsequent “postmodernists” (e.g., Jean Beaudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard) who have rebelled against all grand narratives—have kept up the criticism of capitalism, but have either compromised or utterly abandoned most of the core elements of traditional Marxism including the primacy of class analysis. They have seemingly replaced the class struggle over control of the means of production with the discursive struggle over control of the rules of discourse and ownership of the text (Jameson, 1991, 1997).
At the same time, criticism of Marx’s alleged “economism” is not entirely without merit. Imagining the working class as an “a priori” subject defined by its structural position within the capitalist mode of production allowed orthodox Marxism to neglect or, worse, to merely assume that the proletariat would perform its necessary and predetermined role in the revolutionary process. Bypassing any actual theory of politics, such orthodoxy conjured up a notion of revolution without paying sufficient attention to the motivations and mobilization of the members of the revolutionary class. A homogenous working class, activated exclusively by logical necessity rather than the by a conscious political response to multidimensional social reality, was, as Engels (1890) himself recognized, a “meaningless, abstract, senseless” proposition. Economics may have been the “ultimately determining element in history,” but it is by no means the only one.