Web hosting Custom Email SiteBuilder

Class

My subject in this paper is the construction of class in contemporary neo-Marxist theory. Before I begin my analysis, however, I'd like to take few minutes to comment on the context in which this MLA panel is situated and on the larger issues that are at stake in discussions such as the one we're having here today. [I'd also like to signal my awareness that I won't have much opportunity to comment directly on the implications of my analysis for our common practice as literary scholars. This doesn't mean that these implications aren't immediate and important.]

A few remarks on titles. First, "Marxism After Glasnost: Whither Marxist Criticism?" The year 1989 -- at the end of which this topic was proposed  --   was the "big year" in which the decay and disarray of what has been called "actually existing socialism" became patent. The major upheavals were in the USSR and Eastern Europe, but the reverberations of the crisis have been felt by governing parties in China, Nicaragua and Cuba and by insurgent forces from South Africa to the Philippines to Peru. The word "after" thus carries apocalyptic overtones: after the fall, after the flood, after such knowledge, what forgiveness? "Whither," in a tone of gentle pathos, presents the reverse side of apocalypse   --  abandonment, loss of bearings. "Marxism" and "Marxist criticism," the key substantives, are interrogated. Is there in fact any Marxism left after glasnost? Or has it been dialectically superseded by liberal capitalism, as has been proposed by the neo-Hegelian ideologue of the US State Department, Francis Fukuyama, who posits an "end of history" with the closure of the Cold War? Is "Marxist criticism"  --  if it can get its bearings  --   the residual form that Marxism will take in the future, significantly reduced to adjectival form? And, finally, we have the linchpin, glasnost, "openness"   --  a term denoting nothing "material" but only an attitude, a puny David of discourse that seems by itself to have destroyed the Goliath of monolithic state socialism.

Second, the title of my own talk, "Class," which I quite deliberately have kept free of the elaborate wordplays and subtitles that usually adorn MLA papers (my own included) in order to direct attention to the term itself. In particular, to its referential and analytical power: does it refer to anything real? can it lay claim to significant explanatory status?

I suspect that any number of people in this audience may have come expecting to hear a funeral sermon pronouncing that class, in the traditional Marxist sense, is dead. Such an oration would propose that term "class" may denote one among several subject positions that, as humanists concerned with the politics of culture, we must of course take into account (how can one teach Studs Lonigan or Hard Times or the Second Shepherd's Play and not talk about class?). But class, we would be warned, does not constitute a privileged point of departure for social analysis, much less for political practice. The expectation of such an oration is reasonable enough, given the popularity of the pseudo-historical syllogism that all the Sunday-morning TV pundits are busy deriving from the crisis and disarray touched upon earlier. The syllogism goes something like this. Socialism (sometimes called communism) has failed because it did not recognize that the "free market" accords with human nature much better than a planned economy, and also because political pluralism, as embodied in Western-style electoral politics, makes for much more genuine mass political participation than does a one-party state premised upon democratic centralism. The present degeneration of socialism is attributable mainly to the horrors of Stalinism, wherein the state parades itself as "representing" the populace it oppresses. Stalinism, however, is traceable to Leninism, with its doctrine of the vanguard role played by the revolutionary party. And Leninism is traceable to Marxism, which, in its insistence upon class struggle as the motor force in history and the working class as the bearer of historical transformation, established the reductive and monistic paradigm that has historically conflated class with party with repressive state apparatus. Marxist class analysis is thus not the victim but the culprit in the trajectory that has inevitably brought "actually existing socialism" to its present tragic pass.

No doubt my ironic tone signals my negative assessment of the line of thought described above. To refute this argument  --  which takes in a broad range of theoretical and historical propositions  --  is clearly not a task for this occasion. [To those interested in what my refutation would look like, I would suggest, for starters, that it would have to begin at the other end of the trajectory and construct a historical and theoretical  --  and a posteriori  --  argument that takes into account the various choices that have been made over the past 100 years or so by participants in the movement for an egalitarian society. I would argue that the movement toward repressive state socialism became irreversible only in the Khrushchev era in the USSR, and only after the defeat of the GPCR in the PRC  --  even though the basis for the establishment of the "red bourgeoisies" that have run  --   and continue to run  --  these societies was laid during the Stalin era (and, in the Chinese example, during the 1950s). My main point, however, is that it is mainly good that these attempts to build socialism, and to move toward communism, have occurred. On what could be termed the "reform" level, Communist-led movements have been the key catalysts for progressive change in this century. In the US, the movements for racial justice and unionization were spearheaded by "reds" in the 1930s, and the New Deal government granted many of the benefits we now take for granted largely out of fear of a left-led revolutionary movement. On the global scale, the defeat of the Nazis  --  which was inarguably achieved by the Soviets  --   cannot be said to be an insignificant achievement, nor could the dozens of national liberation movements that were actively aided by the USSR. On what could be termed the "revolutionary" level as well, however, the histories of the construction of socialism give glimpses of the very different sort of world that had the potentiality to come into being. The Soviet Five-Year Plans, the Chinese Great Leap Forward, the Proletarian Cultural Revolution  --  these and other moments in the modern revolutionary process attest not just to the willingness of masses of workers and peasants to throw themselves into the process of physically constructing a new infrastructure that they felt they would control, but also to the dramatic transformations in human relationships and values that were enabled by the movement toward egalitarianism: Uzbek women making bonfires of their veils, Moscow bus-riders performing citizens arrests of fellow-Russians who voiced racist insults to visiting black Americans (reference to Harry Haywood). Even though this movement toward egalitarianism was arrested and reversed, there was no inevitability to the failure of socialism. Nor has the history of 20th-century Communist-led movements been nothing but one grand abortive experiment.]

What I am suggesting, however, is that, in order for Marxism to know where to go after glasnost, however, it needs to develop tools that will enable it to analyze where it has been. The most important of these tools, in my view, is a fuller and deeper understanding of class and class struggle. Without grasping class as not merely confined to what Marxists have traditionally called the "relations of production," but as constitutive of the "forces of production" as well, there is no way of coming to terms with such central theoretical flaws in twentieth-century Communist-led movements as the espousal of the doctrine of productive forces determinism  --  that is, the notion that communism cannot be achieved without abundance, and that industrialization must take precedence over politics and ideology in the construction of a workers' state. Nor, without positing the centrality of class analysis, is there any adequate way of criticizing the anti-fascist strategies of the Popular Front and (in China) New Democracy, which initiated a practice of class- collaborationism from which the Communist left has never recovered. Nor is there any way of penetrating to the essence of glasnost itself, which (and here I run the risk of being accused of base-superstructure mechanism, but I'll take the risk) in 1990 has revealed itself to be the ideological epiphenomenon of perestroika   --  a policy of "restructuring" masterminded by profit- hungry entrepreneurs (many of them present and past Party members) who have taken advantage of the moribundity of state socialism to press for their own crude class interests. [Nor, for that matter, is there any way of analyzing the present sordid scenario in the Middle East, which provides a textbook case of interimperialist rivalry, or of comprehending the brutal IMF- engineered superexploitation of millions of peoples of color who inhabit what is increasingly being called the "Fourth World."] Class analysis, as I hope to show, does not mean romantic workerism, or "vulgar" Marxism, or economic determinism, or the suppression of the multifariousness of contradiction in a monistic paradigm that denies heterogeneity and difference. Rather, it offers the best available means for Marxism to take the measure of its own errors and failures and to forge a revolutionary strategy in the post-glasnost world.

* * *

Thus [halfway through my talk] I come to my "subject"  --    namely, neo-Marxist constructions of class. It perhaps comes as no surprise that I shall argue that neo-Marxism is incapable of confronting the task I have just described. Neo-Marxism has not needed to wait for glasnost in order to trash class and class analysis; for the past 15 years or so it has been "burrowing from within" to undermine the foundations of Marxist orthodoxy. And while, as I have indicated, there is much in that orthodoxy that requires severe and rigorous critique, neo-Marxism has generally proceeded in such a way as to throw out the baby with the bath. Rather than correcting traditional Marxism along the lines I have sketched above, it has stripped Marxism of the very tools that would enable it to make the searching self-criticism that is so badly needed at this juncture.

[In what follows I shall present an admittedly schematic summary of the principal tenets of neo-Marxist doctrine on the question of class. None of the theorists I cite should be taken as espousing the whole paradigm that I outline (though some, such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, come fairly close). Since none of these theorists is a "literary" figure  --  I am not talking about Eagleton or Jameson   --  I am assuming that most of the audience is not familiar with the positions I am explicating and will proceed accordingly.]

A number of neo-Marxists have redefined the key concepts of class and exploitation in such a way as sharply to delimit the range within class analysis would be applicable. Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, for example, posit a distinction between the "class" and "nonclass" processes into which people enter and relate these  --  quite illegitimately, in my view  --  to Marx's distinction between productive and unproductive labor. Marx meant by this distinction simply that workers who produce commodities generate surplus value at the point of production, whereas workers who are paid wages for non-commodity-producing labor do not generate surplus value, but are paid out of the surplus value ultimately generated by other workers. Marx never said that "unproductive" laborers are not exploited, or that they do not form part of the working class. Resnick and Wolff, however, hold that the sale of such workers' labor power for wages is a "nonclass" commodity exchange, which means that they are not exploited and that their relation to their boss is not a class relation. (Tell this to a nurse's aide at Cook County hospital!)

The neo-Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright takes a different tack. While he insists   --  quite rightly  --  that exploitation remains the cornerstone of a definition of the working class, and he finds the distinction between productive and unproductive labor trivial, he expands the definition of exploitation itself in such a way as to obscure the relation to production of that significant sector of managers and professionals that has emerged in the era of monopoly capitalism. Now, I have no quarrel with the attempt to rework the concept of class sectors to account for this grouping, who clearly do not fit easily into Marx's description of the petty bourgeoisie. But Wright maintains that this grouping constitutes not a class sector or fraction but a class, consisting of people who are moreover exploiters of the working class by virtue of their skills and credentials. Moreover, like other "new working class" theorists such as Alvin Gouldner, Wright argues that this new class has displaced the traditional working class as the most probable revolutionary agent. Where Resnick and Wolff undermine the notion of proletarian agency by delimiting the working class to a relatively small sector of commodity-producing manual laborers, Wright posits that the traditional working class has been supplanted by other (presumably) alienated social sectors that are (presumably) better positioned to carry out a revolutionary social transformation. (It's hard to imagine computer programmers storming the White House with carbines in hand   --  but then, Wright probably has another "revolutionary" scenario in mind.)

For most neo-Marxist theorists, however, such redefinitions of the working class and of exploitation are merely prefatory salvos to their main assault  --  against the very bastion of "class essentialism" itself. Laclau and Mouffe assert that the concept of the working class as an actor in history is a "Jacobin imaginary" (a term interchangeable for them with "Stalinist imaginary") and that it is illegitimate  --  and "utopian"  --  to move from the description of a subject position to the "naming of an agent." Resnick and Wolff stipulate that "class" is "an adjective, not a noun" and that, for Marx, the term functioned merely as a "discursive device" without a referent. (When Marx sounded as though he was talking to or about a "real" agent  --    e.g., "Workers of the world unite," etc.  --  he was just doing so for polemical purposes.) Moreover, Resnick and Wolff contend, "class" was for Marx and Engels only an "overdetermined entry point"; they never intended to assert its primacy as a determinant in historical process, and they simply intended to add another voice to the contemporaneous debate over political economy. (Apparently their extensive activities in organizing the First International were exercises in metaphor.)

The neo-Marxist attack on "class essentialism" is generally premised upon three subarguments. The first is that there is no such thing as "objective class interests." Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, for example, argue that "interests are formed through practices" and that "people produce themselves and others through actions." John Brenkman asserts that "'class' does not define a collectivity's interests, needs and aspirations and does not determine its modes of political organization." Now Marx, to be sure, postulated a crucial distinction between the proletariat as a class "in" itself and a class "for" itself, and he held that it would be not a revolutionary force unless it attained class consciousness. But he never asserted that its slowness, or even its failure, in becoming a class "for" itself cancelled out its existence as a class "in" itself objectively in need of gains to be won through both reformist and revolutionary class struggle. For much neo-Marxist theory, however, the proletariat's failure to announce itself as a class negates its existence as a class. By a curious turn of the political wheel, then, neo-Marxism can be charged with the very utopianism of which it accuses orthodox Marxism. For the notion that the modern proletariat  --  despite its submersion an ideological morass beyond compare in human history  --  should spontaneously and transparently assert its class essence, without political mediations, strikes me as the crudest utopianism. Ironically, for all its supposed concern with the "non-economistic" zones of culture and discourse, much neo- Marxist theory pay woefully little attention to the issue of ideology. Rather than seeing barriers to revolutionary working- class consciousness as a political problematic to be analyzed and overcome  --  and, in particular, turning to a critical study of the role played and not played by the left in working-class movements  --  neo-Marxist theorists generally interpret the working class's failure to emerge as a full-blown self-conscious agent to be a function of intrinsic structural features. This certainly simplifies the task of political organizing.

Second, and frequently as a corollary to the rejection of objective class interests, neo-Marxist theory routinely posits that classes exist only to the extent that they "articulate" themselves. Bowles and Gintis proclaim that politics is a contest in which "identity, interests and solidarity are as much the outcome as the starting point of political activity." Laclau and Mouffe state that since "unfixity" is "the condition of every social identity," and since it is necessary to reject the notion of "society" as a "founding totality," the only way that "subject positions" define themselves is through the "articulatory practices" that constitute "discursive structures." (If anyone can tell me exactly what these terms mean I'd be grateful.) Although these theorists do not specify that discourse precisely means talking or writing, it's hard -- as Ellen Woods has pointed out in an excellent critique -- to avoid the elitist implications of such arguments. Who's doing the articulating? What counts as an articulation? What about the vast numbers of oppressed and starving people in Bangladesh and Brazil who aren't doing any articulating at present? Do they not thereby inhabit valid subject positions? Moreover, do articulations always represent needs in the process of constructing them? Did the millions of Iranian and Iraqi soldiers who killed one another over the last decade, in "articulating" themselves as members of nations and religions, express their "identities" and "interests"?

Third, neo-Marxist theorists routinely attack "class essentialism" because they have another card up their sleeves --  namely, the "new social movements," variously described as feminism, ecological initiatives, movements for racial and ethnic recognition, or even religious movements such as liberation theology. Although Laclau and Mouffe caution that class essentialism should not be supplanted by an essentialism positing any other social groupings as "the" bearers of historical truth, they and other neo-Marxists rely upon the "evidence" supposedly furnished by such movements to reinforce their attack upon the traditional Marxist privileging of the working class.

The "new social movements" are generally seen to move beyond the limitations of class-based struggles because they are non-economistic. As Bowles and Gintis put it, movements based on feminist and ecological issues are concerned not with a "politics of getting" but with a "politics of "becoming" and, by contrast with class-based battles over "resources," are focused upon the "primacy of moral and cultural ends." Aside from its romantically countercultural overtones (one gets distinct vibes of beads and be-ins), there are a number of problems with such a simplistic formulation. First, have working-class struggles only been over "resources"? Particularly at times and in places where leftists have exercised significant influence in the labor movement (in the US, for example, before all the Communists were kicked out of the unions), workers' strike demands -- around antiracist, antiwar, and antifascist issues -- have taken a demonstrably non-economistic turn. Moreover, what's wrong with struggling over "resources," if one is being deprived of them? Bowles and Gintis come perilously close to reproducing the standard bourgeois view of greedy workers grubbing (God forbid) for more bucks and of proposing -- in a replaying of the script first read by the young Hegelians against whom Marx and Engels polemicized -- that revolution is in the head. Finally, the neo- Marxist valorization of "non-economistic" movements betrays the distinctly non-revolutionary nature of its political agenda. For insofar as these movements entail struggles for power, these are wholly reformist. "Democracy" replaces "socialism" -- and, needless to say, "communism" -- as the goal of the pluralistic "historical bloc" constituted by the "new social movements." Since everything is "plural" -- power, oppression, hegemony -- the pluralistic system of liberal democracy, if only humanized, offers the means to the best of all possible worlds.

Despite the difficulty neo-Marxists have in pointing to significant concrete achievements gained by the "new social movements," however, they continue to insist upon these movements' exemplary significance -- in no small part, I suspect, because of the "proof" they supply to neo-Marxism's theoretical stance. For fundamental to the attack on "class essentialism" is the notion that traditional Marxism is reductionist and authoritarian in its pretension to finding in class and class struggle a "scientific" basis for understanding social phenomena. Indeed, as Laclau and Mouffe remark -- in language suggesting affinity with plain old-fashioned anti-communism of the Hannah Arendt variety -- the very claim to "sure knowledge of the social" -- whether from the left or the right -- is "totalitarian." Claiming the ontological centrality of the working class establishes Marxism's seat of epistemological privilege, and this in turn leads to the dictum that the party, and thence the state, becomes the "depository of science." In upholding the "new social movements" as an alternative to class-based struggles, neo-Marxism is thus doing more than make a practical suggestion about where to put one's political energies. It is issuing the warning that, since oppression is generated at multiple sites, to reduce the complexity of subordination and dominance to the monistic paradigm of class antagonism is to threaten those principles of heterogeneity and difference that form the conditions of possibility for "articulation."

I am running short of time and clearly do not have the opportunity to engage in the race/class/gender debate, which is the most important issue (to my mind the only issue really worth pursuing) that is raised by the neo-Marxist critique of class essentialism. Clearly the traditional left has historically either short-shrifted or misconstrued the crucial zones of race and gender. (Though I would also suggest that an investigation into the actual theory and practice of the Communist-left with regard to these issues -- such as I am attempting to undertake in my own current work on 1930s US literary radicalism -- produces an analysis that is a good deal more nuanced than that contained in many neo-Marxist and feminist broadsides against the "failures" of the left. ) But the left's historical weaknesses in relating various forms of oppression to the fundamental category of exploitation do not entail the conclusion that race or gender -- or any other analytical paradigm extractable from any of the new social movements -- offers a superior strategy for grappling with the phenomenon of oppression. Nor do these weaknesses mean that, taken together as a Gramscian "historic bloc," these "new social movements" offer any threat to capital comparable to that posed by a working-class movement (including, of course, large numbers of women and people of color) "in" and "for" itself. To posit the centrality of class struggle in effecting fundamental social transformation is not tantamount to saying that all social processes are effluxes of the class contradiction and can be unproblematically collapsed into it. To be sure, social reality is comprised of multiple contradictions that are not all mediations of one grand contradiction. But to concede this point is not to conclude that there is only contingency and (a favored neo-Marxist analytical term) overdetermination. To posit the centrality of class struggle is to assert that -- as long as we inhabit class society -- class struggle is essence- (yes, essence-) determining for the social formation as a whole, and that the form taken by other contradictions is shaped and delimited by the configuration of the dominant class contradiction.

In less Hegelian language: if we wish to be free of the class contradiction, and all the oppressions attendant upon it, we must not jettison the analytical concepts of class and class struggle, but refine them and develop them. For Marxism to play a transformative role in the post-glasnost world, it must become more Marxist, not less so.