CURRENT DEBATES IN MARXISM

Current orthodoxy would suggest that Marxism’s flame is low. However, the truth is that this is nothing new. Marx in his life was stalked from the beginning, because his ideas (and those of Engels) were hugely important in a number of spheres. They were important to economics, history, social class. Marxism was an initiator in the scientific approach to analysing human society; it was to the fore in showing the intermeshed relationship between material conditions and the gestation of ideas in society; Marxism forged some of the major revolutions of modern times.

And indeed, philosophy for Marx is not separate. It is woven into the fabric of practical issues around changing the world, not just interpreting it. Hence, his anti-idealist position which involved turning Hegel upside down. "Social being determines consciousness" – and not the other way about.

In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels state:

It is fair to say that such debates have revolved around one of the major themes and events of 20^th century history: the creation of the Soviet Union, its political and ideological defence, and latterly, in the dying years of the century, the death of Soviet Communism itself and the speculations as to whether the end of communism in the material sense has spelt the demise of Marxism as an intellectually respectable theory.

Within the circles of Marxist politics, various key positions have been formulated:

First, the Trotskyist position, formulated by intellectuals such as Ernest Mandel and various far left sects:- namely, the Soviet Union was a ‘degenerated workers’ state’: a state bureaucracy straining to become a communist society.

Second, the International Socialists (now known as the Socialist Workers Party) position, largely stemming from Tony Cliff’s state capitalist theory, and the work of Chris Harman on Eastern European regimes, that the Soviet Union was a form of bureaucratic state capitalism within which the bureaucratic class dominated the economy, with the constant aim of increased production. In its essentials, they argued, the Soviet Union acted like the United States: as an Imperial power, and was an integral part of a world economic and political order, competing with the capitalist West for military supremacy. In the end, the demands of competing in the whirlwind of global capitalism sank the Soviet Union and its Empire. There is no doubt that the Soviets were sucked into global competition, and could not survive the twists and turns of global complexity, but how could the state capitalist analysis account for the venomous ideological hostilities of the Cold War?

Again, how viable could Marxism remain, in the wake of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, followed by the total collapse of Soviet communist hegemony in 1991? Certainly, many apologists for capitalism have been quick to dismiss Marxism as any kind of alternative to capitalism. The work of Francis Fukuyama, in his triumphalist "End of History" suggested that no opposition to capitalism remains.

In offering any answers to this, three main themes have contributed to more recent debates in Marxism: has the working class disappeared as a robust political force?; what has been the response of Marxists to Fukuyama?; has globalisation displaced critical Marxist analysis?, or is this latter area proving to offer the very basis for Marxism’s resurgence; and what sort of ripostes have come from Marxists to the onslaughts from postmodernism and intellectualised cynicism?

The contemporary debate was basically begun by Andre Gorz’s Farewell to the Working Class, 1980, which more or less wrote off the working class as a political force, in the wake of severe defeats and huge social structural shifts in capitalism. Nicos Poulantzas argued, however, that a new set of petit bourgeois workers had emerged, potentially opposed to monopoly capitalism. Marxist economist Eric Ohlin Wright argued that in the workplace there were no longer clear lines of conflict between workers and bosses, given the development of positions that were contradictory, such as middle managers and foremen. Again, the celebrated Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm detected a huge decline in political class consciousness in the wake of the changes in the workforce.

A seminal text on such themes, attracting much attention among Marxists and socialists, was Laclau and Mouffe’s, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: towards a Radical Democratic Politics , 1985, which wrote off workers as a political force, and substituted the plurality of groups found in democratic society. Links with the new social movements were the order of the day – not economistic Marxist principles – and a recognition of the new forms of identity (the new icon of the postmodern zeitgeist?) was to be nurtured through ‘discourse’.

Ellen Meiskins Wood attacked Laclau and Mouffe for distorting Marx’s view of the economy, and refuted their fundamental assumption that identities were discursively constructed, since the significance of history and social change was wiped out. Norman Geras’s barbed critique suggested that for L&M and their ‘democratic revolution’, any social movement would do!

In more measured tones, Jules Townsend (1996) has suggested that L&M located Marxism’s Achilles heel – the ignoring of how personal and group identities are formed. Townsend adds that : "… the possibility of a revolutionary turn in the working class in the future cannot be categorically ruled out, if a deep, multifaceted capitalist crisis occurred at all levels, economic, social, political and ideological, so that the capitalist class had neither the physical nor the moral resources to continue its rule."

Ironically, postmodernism in philosophy and social theory has emerged from the writings of former Marxists, especially Jean-Francois Lyotard (cf. The Postmodern Condition) and his pronouncement on the disappearance of the ‘grand narrative' (which includes science, reason, discourse on truth and Marxism. Knowledge is no longer a value, but has a use. Alex Callinicos ,in his ‘Against Postmodernism’ has produced perhaps the most comprehensive and cutting critique. In his book, he argues that postmodernism has taken away all hopes of throwing over capitalism, but offers no alternative perspective in its place. In this respect, Callinicos suggests that Lyotard’s analysis, far from being value free, contains far-reaching implications in its abandonment of any alternative to the capitalist system. Postmodernism, historically, represents the disappointment of the failure of the 1968 rebellions – the concept of resistance has evacuated its political content. Short shrift is given to Jean Baudrillard’s work, which removes the distinction between essence and appearance, given that we are living in an image-laden world: an epoch of hyper-reality. But for Callinicos theorists such as Baudrillard and post-structuralists have pushed so far towards abandoning the economic-determinist…model that they have completely lost touch with the material factors that influence their own and every other form of cultural production. (Norris, 1996, 192).

"…people do not live by MTV alone, but continue to have mundane needs for food, clothing and shelter, meeting which makes the organisation and control of production still the major determinant of the nature of our societies" (Against Postmodernism, p.128).

Finally, the Marxist tradition is currently to the fore in the globalisation debate. Much of the discourse on globalisation has tended to be uncritical and bound up with neo-liberalism and the freeing of markets. However, for Marxist writers the development is nothing new. The classical Marxist analysis of 19^th century capitalism (circa Communist Manifesto 1848) is still highly appropriate. As Ferguson et al. (2002) have noted, capitalism’s insatiable need to accumulate has not changed. It is now, however, the ease of global investment for capital, by the massive multinationals, and the seeking of the lowest wage levels, which mark out the current ‘globalised’ economy. All this is being done with the connivance of the modern state. And the contemporary anti-globalisation mobilisations (Seattle, Washington, Prague, Gothenburg) suggest a focus not on fragmented issues, but on the total capitalist system. It would appear that Marx and Marxism are alive and kicking.

Harry Cowen.

REFERENCES

Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848.

Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, Polity, 1989.

Ian Ferguson, Michael Lavalette, Gerry Mooney, Rethinking Welfare: A Critical Perspective, Sage, 2002.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Verso, 1985.

Jules Townsend, The Politics of Marxism, Leicester UP, 1996.