When Das Kapital interrupted the course and rent the fabric of
this whole historical movement, it was like an inaudible thunderclap, a silence, a margin.
(Gerard Granel, Preface to Husserl, La Crise des sciences européennes)
Capital is an essentially subversive work. It is such less because it leads, by way of scientific objectivity, to the necessary consequence of revolution, than because it includes, without formulating it too explicitly, a mode of theoretical thinking that overturns the very idea of science.
(Maurice Blanchot, ‘Marx’s Three Voices’)
As Isabelle Stengers has suggested, ‘remaining faithful to a line of thinking first of all involves learning to resist it.’ Committed to such resistance visa-vis Marx and what he took from his epoch, I have set out to discover what remains actively current in his many voices.
Marx’s actuality attaches, in the first instance, to the universalization and morbid energy of capital itself. Having become global, capital is more than ever the spirit of an age bereft of spirit, marked by the impersonal power of the reign of commodities. It is our leaden horizon, our sad lot. As long as capital continues to dominate social relations, Marx’s theory will retain its currency, its endless renewals constituting the reverse side and negation of universal commodity fetishism.
‘Written in black and white’, Capital ‘painted it red’ and sent ‘European humanity’ into crisis.1 Far from muffling its ‘inaudible thunder’, accelerating global upheaval finally makes it possible to hear it.
Marx’s Three Critiques
This does not mean pitting some original, authentic Marx against counterfeit versions, or restoring a truth seized from us long ago, but disturbing the heavy slumber of orthodoxies. So multifaceted an oeuvre is sustained by its diverse and contrasting interpretations. The contradictory multiplicity of established ‘Marxism’ derives from the comparative undecidability of texts in which a critical decipherment of social hieroglyphics is intimately bound up with the practical subversion of the existing order. Registering a directly critical voice, a political voice that is ‘always excessive . . . since excess is its only measure’, and the indirect voice of scientific discourse, Maurice Blanchot notes that these discourses are held together by ‘disparity’. They are not juxtaposed, but intertwined and intermingled. Diversity o f registers should not be confused with vulgar electicism, and ‘Marx does not live comfortably with this plurality of languages, which always collide and disarticulate themselves in him.’2
Torn between his fascination with the physical model of positive science and his loyalty to ‘German science’, between the siren calls of progress and rejection of its artificial paradises, Marx quarrels with his own shadow, and wrestles with his own spectres. His thought, riddled with unresolved contradictions, is far from homogeneous. But neither is it incoherent or inconsistent. The core of his research programme still makes it possible to question the universe we inhabit, with a view to changing the world. It cannot be employed for eclectic collages and media rush jobs. What we are dealing with is not a doctrine, but the theory of a practice open to several readings. Not any readings whatsoever: not everything is permissible in the name of free interpretation; not everything is valid. Text and context specify constraints, define a field of variations compatible with its own aporias, and consequently invalidate the results of misinterpretation.
Thus, Marx’s theory is sometimes defined as a philosophy of history, its meaning and culmination; sometimes as a sociology o f classes and method of classification; and sometimes as an enterprise in scientific economics. None of these definitions survives a rigorous reading. While it is by no means easy to state what Marx’s theory is, at least it is possible to clarify what it is not.
It is not a speculative philosophy of history. Professedly a deconstruction of universal History, it opens the way to a history that promises no salvation, offers no guarantee to redress injustice - not even the faintest possibility. A profane history emerges whose trajectory is unsettled, in that it is determined conjointly by struggle and necessity. Hence there is no question of founding a new philosophy of some unidirectional history. What we have, instead, is a new way of writing history, whose alphabet is suggested by the Grundrisse. Capital thus indissociably deploys a new representation of history, and a conceptual organization of dme as a social relation: cycles and turnovers, rhythms and crises, strategic moments and contretemps. The old philosophy of history thus fades into a critique of commodity fetishism on the one hand, and political subversion of the existing order on the other.
Marx’s theory is not an empirical sociology of classes, either. Contrary to positive reason, which arranges and classifies, inventories and itemizes, soothes and assuages, it brings out the dynamics of social conflict and renders the phantasmagoria of commodities intelligible. Not that the various social antagonisms (of sex, status or nation) are reducible to class relations. The diagonal of the class front links and conditions them, but without conflating them. From this kind of perspective, the other (alien on account of his or her religion, traditions, origins, chapel or parish) can always become one of us through a process of real universalization. That is why social classes are never objects or categories of sociological classification, but the very expression of historical development.
Finally, Marx’s theory is not a positive science of the economy conforming to the then dominant model of classical physics. A contemporary of the sciences of evolution and the advance of thermodynamics, it is recalcitrant to the compartmentalized, one-sided rationality of the scientific division of labour - all the more so since the strange choreography of commodities and currencies inclines it towards the then unknown logics of systems and information. Just as it would be anachronistic to make Marx’s theory the conscious pioneer of the latest epistemology, so it is dear that the erratic behaviour of capital inflects it towards unexplored paths. Paradoxically, here Marx rediscovers the synthesizing ambitions of the old metaphysics, which he explicitly adopts in the shape of ‘German science’ [deutschen Wissenschajl]. Revival of this tradition enables him to tackle the non-linear logics, laws of tendency, and conditional necessities of what Gramsci shrewdly identified as a ‘new immanence’.
These three critiques - of historical reason, economic reason, and scientific positivity - match and complement one another. They are directly relevant to current questions about the end of history and the representation of time; about the relationship between class struggle and other types of conflict; about the destiny of the hard sciences tormented by the uncertainties of the narrative sciences. If it is not a philosophy of history, a sociology of class, or a science of the economy, what is Marx’s theory? By way of a provisional response, we might say: not a doctrinal system, but a critical theory of social struggle and the transformation of the world.
Vectors of Possibility
In his sketch of a new way of writing history, Marx stresses the role of the asynchrony or non-contemporaneity of economic, juridical and aesthetic spheres. The dynamic of social conflict operates in the rifts and fractures of this discordance of temporalities. Marx’s thought is itself situated at the meeting point where the metaphysical legacy of Greek atomism, Aristotelian physics and Hegelian logic is put to the test of the Newtonian epistemological model, the flourishing of historical disciplines, and rapid developments in the knowledge of the living being. Profoundly anchored in its present, it oversteps and exceeds that present in the direction of the past and the future. That is why the echo of its discourse was practically inaudible to contemporaries insensitive to the art of contretemps. It was easier for inheritors and epigones to translate it into the humdrum music of the dominant positivism and reassuring odes to progress.
Positioned at the intersection of typically non-con tern poraneous tracks, Marx emerges today as an audacious vector of possibilities. As the crust of orthodoxies flakes off, it is an auspicious moment to revive long disdained or ignored potentialities. In search of this untimely Marx, tom between present, past and future, I have traversed the variegated landscape of a century of readings and commentaries. The approaches of Karl Kautsky or Rosa Luxemburg, Nicolai Bukharin or Karl Korsch, Louis Althusser or Roman Rosdolsky, do not lead to the same Marx. We must therefore choose our path and our company. For my part, I have prioritized two other great intermediaries: Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci. Their tragic destinies as outsiders enabled them to hear what remained inaudible to the majority of Marx’s professed disciples, anxious to translate his unusual words into a familiar language, which was inevitably that of the dominant ideology. Against the somnolent cult of progress and its often illusory promises, they approached Marx via remarkably convergent, difficult and unfrequented roads. From his Moscow Diary (1927) to the Theses on the Philosophy of History (1939), Benjamin deepened his Messianic critique of temporal abstraction. At the same moment, in the experience of defeat, Gramsci drew the consequences of the inherently uncertain character of the conflict in his Prison Notebooks (1930-36): the only thing that could be forecast was class struggle - not its precise occasions. The result was a conception of politics as strategy and error as the risk inherent in any decision.
The vitality of a theory is tested by the refutations to which it is subject and the mutations it can experience without disintegrating. Engaging in this game of contradiction, I have often prioritized confrontation with Karl Popper and the current of ‘Analytical Marxism’.
• With Popper, because his critique of Marxist historicism - which to my mind is largely unfounded - pervaded the ideological counter-offensive of the 1970s in France, preparing the way for the social, political and moral counter-reformation whose damage we are assessing today. Popper’s epistemology, although questionable, is definitely more valuable than his vague philosophy, which in its turn is better than vulgar Popperianism reduced to an ideological commonplace.
• With Analytical Marxism (G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, John Roemer, Erik Olin Wright), because throughout the 1980s the merit of these authors was to pose fundamental questions about history, progress and class in the light of the tragic experiences of the twentieth century. They sought to save Marx from his archaism by formulating a general theory of history (Cohen) or exploitation (Roemer), informed by recent developments in game theory and theories of justice. The result - recognized as such – was the methodical destruction of the central theoretical core of Marx’s thought (value theory, abstract labour, the relation between value and prices), which illustrates the incompatibility between any radical methodological individualism and a critical theory of social conflict.
More generally, the bankruptcy of the state policies implemented in Marx’s name since the late 1920s supposedly demonstrates the impossibility of combining two distinct research programmes: the critique of political economy and the theory of history; an analysis of social conflict and an understanding of historical evolution. Their hastily proclaimed identity served scientifically to justify the necessity of a socialist alternative, ‘historical Marxism’ drawing its mythical power and eliciting credulity from a link that could not be demonstrated. The fusion of history, science and ethics, however, is characteristic of positivist catechisms and the freemasonry of raison d’etat, rather than the subversive thought of Marx himself. In truth, what is dying is the historical cult of modernity, of which the established Marxism were ultimately only variants.
Uncertain, history neither promises nor guarantees anything. Undecided, the struggle is not destined to redress injustice. Science without ethics does not prescribe the good in the name of the true.
The three parts of this book take up Marx’s three great critiques (of historical reason, economic reason and scientific positivism). But in order to remain within the requisite limits, it has been necessary to be selective, at the risk of being criticized for neglecting some aspect or other.3 1 have also opted to let the texts speak for themselves. Their polysemy often says more than any commentary could - and says it better. Hence this decision is not academic: assembling and juxtaposing extracts make it possible to outline the constellation of an epoch, to awaken echoes under the impact of the present.
I am indebted to all those who have contributed to this book, whether by their advice and criticism, their articles and works, their bibliographical information, or simply their conversation. In particular, I thank Antoine Artous, Michel Husson, Samuel Joshua, Vincent Jullien, Georges Labica, Nicole Lapierre, Francisco Louca, Michael Lowy, Henri Maler, Sophie Oudin, Edwy Plenel, Miguel Romero, Pierre Rousset, Catherine Samary, Isabelle Stengers, Stavros Tombazos, Charles-Andre Udry, and Robert Went. I am equally grateful to Olivier Betoume for his pertinent suggestions.
Finally, this book owes a great deal to Francois Maspero, whose editorial efforts saved so many essential texts from oblivion or indifference. In this way, he helped to transmit a theoretical heritage to us, and open up the horizon of a many-sided controversy.
Notes
1. Gerard Granel, Preface to Edmund Husserl, La Crise des sciences europeennes, Gallimard, Paris 1976, p. vii.
2. Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Three Voices of Marx', in Blanchot, Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA 1997, pp. 98-100.
3. Readers thirsting for more are referred to my La Discordance des temps. Essais sur les crises, les clases, l’histoire (Editions de la Passion, Paris 1995), containing chapters on crises and ‘long waves’ that illustrate the ‘new appreciation of time’ introduced here, as well as chapters on castes and bureaucracy, the social relations of sex, or the link between globalization and the retreat into identity. In a sense, La Discordance des temps represents the counterpoint and complement to Marx for Our Times.
Excerpt from: Daniel Bensaid. "Marx for Our Times".
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