I am teaching the foundations course in our graduate program this year: “Classical Sociological Theory.” It’s a challenge. The last time I taught such a class was thirty years ago. Yet, it’s a challenge worth taking. Aside from the matters of departmental needs and resources, this is something that I believe will be particularly interesting for me, and also for my students. Over those thirty years, I have actively thought about the events of the day, and about my research, using foundational thinkers (though some more than others), “standing on the shoulders of giants.” It is exciting to revisit old friends, including, among others, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel and George Herbert Mead, and spend some time, introducing them to students at the beginning of their professional training.
The first theorist was easy, Alexis de Tocqueville. I have taught an undergraduate class on his masterpiece, Democracy in America, frequently. My new book, Reinventing Political Culture: The Power of Culture versus the Culture of Power, is not only informed by Tocqueville’s approach to culture and democracy. It is in a sense in dialogue with Tocqueville. And as the readers of Deliberately Considered know when I look at current events, I often interpret them using the insights of Tocqueville from understanding the nature of the American party system and for contemporary political debate, such as the struggle over workers’ rights in Wisconsin.
Karl Marx, the second theorist we examined in our class, is another matter. Like many intellectuals since his time, I have a history with Marx. As I told the class in an introduction to our discussions last week, when I was young and especially critical, I thought that to be critical required one to read, know and act through Marx. I remember having a course in high school which I found particularly upsetting, “The Problems of Communism.” The author of the class text was J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the F.B. I. Talk about the state ideological apparatus, as the orthodox French Marxist, Louis Althusser, would have put it. In reaction against this nonsense, I found The Communist Manifesto in my local public library, and started my long relationship with Marx and Marxism.
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Marxist, to paraphrase the terms of the anti-Communist witch hunt of the 50s and early 60s. But I was a Marxist wannabe. In high school, I found the propaganda I was fed so infuriating that I thought the enemy of my enemy must be my friend. But I didn’t have the knowledge or capacity to understand whether this friendship was genuine.
Bas-relief of an iron forger in Warsaw's MDM neighborhood (Plac Konstytucji) © Piotrus | Wikimedia Commons
As a college student, I developed my skills and expanded my knowledge. I became particularly enchanted with the Frankfurt School, especially Herbert Marcuse and his One Dimensional Man, as did many student radicals of the time. Indeed, I still find this neo-Marxist, heterodox school of thought quite enlightening, as my class will discover when we discuss Max Weber in a few weeks. Theirs is a cultural critique of capitalism, which has its problems, but also carries important insights. I think of the position as left-wing Weberian thought, informed by Weber’s understanding of the relationship between the economy, the state and various cultural endeavors. But when it came to Marx’s focus on productive forces and the centrality of class, I tried, even pretended to be convinced, but I never was.
My failure as a Marxist was consummated when I did research in Poland. I saw that environmental degradation wasn’t controlled under socialism, that, in fact, it was worse. Sexual and gender equality were more distant ideals under communism than they were under capitalism. Bourgeois democracy was real, while people’s democracy wasn’t, or, at least, democracies of the U.S. and Western Europe were much closer to democratic ideals than were the people’s democracies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. I came to think that these shortcomings were not unrelated to Marxist analysis and politics.
I didn’t talk about these political issues in class. I just maintained that despite my history with Marx, I think of him as a great 19th century social thinker, along with others, and that our task was to try to understand his position as it might inform ours today. Our task was to learn Marx, not to bury him (as was the goal of my high school communism text).
In the class, I want to let the important works of early sociology speak for themselves, without imposing my specific and often idiosyncratic interpretations. With Marx I thought the way to do this was to ironically tell the class a little about my “personal relationship” with him. I’m pretty sure the session was successful, but I do have a regret.
When I explained that I had been a Marxist wannabe, I didn’t adequately explain why my project failed. I have concluded that Marx’s central notion that man is the producing animal is too thin, and that the sociological implication he draws from this notion, i.e. that the history hitherto is the history of class struggles, is reductive. He presents important insights using this frame, but too many important issues are best understood outside the frame, including the sorts of issues I have focused on.
Yet, and this yet is important, Marx demonstrated that class matters and how it matters. From the sociological point of view, this was his great accomplishment, one that is important for scholarship and has great political importance today. Class is not an illusion, as many on the American political scene maintain. Class analysis, informed by Marx, provides a way to systematically study inequality. Such study in an America where the rich are getting rich, and the poor are getting poorer, is of the foremost importance.
I was never a Marxist. A focus of on cultural anthropology as an undergrad encouraged a social constructivist call for liberation from such materialistic and economistic strangleholds, a call to overcome thinking which reduced complex human beings to their instrumental purpose in the economy. Then I graduated unemployed. Desperately needing a job to pay such things as student loan debt, I found myself a button-pushing tool of Corporate America desperately trying to keep a job I hated and surrounded by countless complex individuals reduced to the same cubicle-confined button pushing. Now I am a Marxist.
The problem has never been Marxist critique of classical economics. It is simply a mirror image of the ahistorical liberal ideal historicized and exposing the actual relations of power between people who function in a capitalist economy. Marxism is best limited to this: a theory of capitalism. The theoretical system offers only a power-relations approach to economic organization and it is not surprising instituting it as a political ideology resulted how it did: a blatant system of exploitation by those well-born, well-connected or well-suited to sycophancy over those who were not. The problem is thus Marxist politics were a mirror image as well.
Class certainly matters, but the possibility, or even expectation, of upward mobility in American does often make its significance seem ephemeral. Differences between the cultures of different classes in the United States also do not seem to be as significant as they are in Europe. A millionaire might dress in jeans and a t-shirt and a “petite bourgeois” might, with the assistance of a credit card, might try to emulate the lifestyle of a millionaire. These factors seem to mitigate the possibilities of any given class, socioeconomic class really, identifying themselves as a class in the Marxian sense. Not that class consciousness completely disappears, but it just doesn’t seem to be integral to how Americans identify themselves.
Nonetheless, income differentials remain glaringly obvious. It seems to me then that studying class in terms of how these differentials might translate into power differentials is where the true significance of class, even if only as a statistical socio-economic class, may lie. And as the possibilities for upward mobility diminish and Americans become less prone to extravagant expenditures with borrowed money, class differences might become more salient and the phrase “class warfare” that gets tossed around on Fox News may become more than just a talking point.
“Once I went to May Day. I never got the workers’ festivities. The day of work, are you kidding? The day of workers celebrating themselves. I never got it into my head what workers’ day or the day of work meant. I never got it into my head why work should be celebrated. But when I wasn’t working I didn’t know what the f*** to do. Because I was a worker, that is, someone who spent most their day in the factory. And in the time left over I could only rest for the next day. But that May Day on a whim I went to listen to some guy’s speech because I didn’t know him.” Nanni Balestrini.
“With the bourgeoisie, work becomes work that transforms historical conditions. The bourgeoisie is the first ruling class for which work is a value.” Debord.
My own relationship to Marx is a good deal different from yours.
I never bothered to actually read Marx for quite a long time. I was vaguely interested in radical politics throughout my adolescence, but I never went much further than liberal platitudes (opposition to the death penalty or the PATRIOT ACT, for instance). But then I got older, I started working. And I realized that I despised work, even more than I despised high school or church. Somehow, in all that, I got the idea to really read Marx.
It was in Marx that I very much saw the world in which I lived. I never worked in a factory, but the “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse, for instance, spoke directly to my lived experience. By contrast, I have never read Tocqueville or any of the other great dead whites and felt like they were talking about my life. Rather, they seem adamant to justify the ways of capital to men, by introducing all sorts of ideological veneer. (In Tocqueville’s case, for instance, it isn’t the march of commodification that is the catalyst for “democratization”; rather, it is providence! That is an understanding of the world even more mystical than Hegel’s!)
There is a way that Marx is read, and has been read, that sees him as essentially a Ricardian filtered through Hegel (or vice versa). This is the traditional reading all the way from Kautsky and Lenin to Habermas. It relies, fundamentally, on always presupposing the transhistorical nature of labour. From this reading, then, it is a simple step to nationalizing a few banks and calling it a “workers’ state”, while leaving the drudgery and pointlessness of everyday life hopelessly unscathed.
Yet, there is another way to read Marx, one that views labour as a properly historical category – since value itself is historical, so must be labour. Marx’s theory of value is often treated as transhistorical, but this is not Marx’s actual thoughts on the matter. Indeed, he reminds us early on in Capital that Aristotle could not have a true theory of value because Aristotle did not live in a society of labourers. It is no use to simply redistribute the products of labour, which even Warren Buffett can accept; labour itself must be destroyed. Thus in the Grundrisse:
“It requires no great penetration to grasp that, where e.g. free labour or wage labour arising out of the dissolution of bondage is the point of departure, there machines can only arise in antithesis to living labour, as property alien to it, and as power hostile to it; i.e., that they must confront it as capital. But it is just as easy to perceive that machines will not cease to be agencies of social production when they become e.g. property of the associated workers. In the first case, however, their distribution, i.e., that they do not belong to the worker, is just as much a condition of the mode of production founded on wage labour. In the second case the changed distribution would start from a changed foundation of production, a new foundation first created by the process of history.”
To create a new mode of distribution, there must be a “changed foundation” of production. The “changed foundations” introduced by Lenin, Mao, and company, were not phases of the instauration of communism, but episodes of primitive accumulation tout court. These were capitalist atrocities through and through, carried out by Jacobin parties. Debord: “The industrialization of the Stalin era revealed the bureaucracy’s ultimate function: continuing the reign of the economy by preserving the essence of market society: commodified labour.”
Of course, maybe the word “communist” is too corrupted to be of much use. There is certainly something a bit absurd about arguing over what is and is not properly “communist” in the 21st century. But this is only to say that there is a possible society, a possible form of life, where the value-form has ceased to exist, where labour has ceased to exist. Perhaps, as Agamben suggests, such a condition will resist the mediation of such terms altogether; perhaps we should speak of the “coming community”, the “whatever singularity” that rejects such identifications as “worker” and “communist” altogether in favor of simple belonging itself?
So the nomination “communist” is merely for analytical purposes here. Perhaps it obscures the immanent revolt always already carried out by working people. Mario Tronti: “From the very beginning, the proletariat is nothing more than the immediate political interest in the abolition of every aspect of the existing order. As far as its internal development is concerned, it has no need of “institutions” in order to bring to life what it is, since what it is is nothing other than the life-force of that immediate destruction. It doesn’t need institutions, but it does need organization… The concept of the revolution and the reality of the working class are one and the same.”
For me, there is no question of compiling lists of atrocities carried out by Pol Pot and the Shining Path as evidence of the failure of communism. Rather, the revolution is always already where the workers are struggling against their conditions (“We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”). The struggle against labour, ie the struggle against capitalism itself, has hitherto been a failure – but the failure of the struggle against labour has been obscured not only by the apologists of capital, but by the false critics of capital (from Lenin to Zizek). Locating the failure of communism in places like the Eastern Bloc already hands an ideological victory to capital, when, indeed, one is simply pointing to a failed method of administering the commodity-form, to a failed method of imposing work. Deleuze and Guattari:
“Those who keep invoking the bloody failure of socialism don’t seem to consider as a failure the present state of the global capitalist market, with the bloody inequalities it involves, the populations pushed off the market, etc. It’s been a long time since the American ‘revolution’ has failed, even before the Soviets’ did. The situations and revolutionary attempts are generated by capitalism itself and they are not going to disappear.”
One of my earliest exposures to Marx was through his “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” Maybe it was the chapter on “Estranged Labor” that caught my attention.
Ironically, I think that many of the issues raised in it may have inspired an organizational improvement technique called a sociotechnical-systems redesign approach pioneered by Eric Trist and Red Emery in the 1950’s when they were at the Tavistock Institute in London. According to Ault, Walton and Childers in What Works, “The theory and practice are grounded in the fundamental concept that work gets done more effectively when the separate but highly interdependent social and technical systems that produce the flow of that work are ‘jointly optimized’ rather than more traditional ‘maximizing’ of the technical system at the expense of the social. Among other results, this sociotechnical movement had led to the widespread use of self-managed work teams and other elements of what are now commonly known as ‘high commitment’ or ‘high-performance’ organizations.”
It is very difficult and can be time consuming to implement this process, but the results seem to be fewer alienated workers, and more who get satisfaction from their work activities. This type of reorganization has sometimes been described as an example of democracy in the workplace. My guess is that Marx would not approve of this process, and probably would consider this another means of exploiting workers. I disagree with this perspective as do most people who actually are exposed to people working in these types of organizations. It is difficult to predict was actually develops from the dialectic!!!
in order to study the classics, historical conditions and the evolution of the societies other than the industrialized world should be made clear. one of the reasons why some academics continue to hold old marxist discourses is their external examination of the late coming societies….