On “Class” and Related Concepts in Classical Marxism, and Why Is the Post-al Left Saying Such Terrible Things about Them?
(After Reading Shaun Huston’s Letter/Essay)
Mas’ud Zavarzadeh
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • Spring 1994 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 3, No. 3 (pp. 5-11) | ||
| • October 1, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
Shaun Huston’s text is interesting for the pedagogical lucidity with which it rehearses (and thus foregrounds) the logical moves of what I have called the post-al1 argument that is now dominant in the (post)modern academy. In the following discussion, I will focus, for the most part, on the analytics and politics of his “logic.” However, I have also provided, by way of example in a few cases, the history of concepts (such as “contingent workforce”) which are so violently erased from his discussion. My purpose is, of course, to “historicize” his call for the “historicization” (by which is actually meant “rewriting” and abandoning) of classical Marxism.
Grasping the post-al logic, I believe, is politically useful because it enables one to get hold of the grid of economic intelligibility that underlies this form of bourgeois “argument” and to realize its complicity with the ruling social relations of production. Post-al argument uses locally different materials and instances for different occasions, but it reasserts over and over again its global priorities which legitimate the existing class structures that are necessary for the “natural” continuation of the regime of capital and wage-labor. The local “thematics” of Huston’s text are of less interest because they are a very familiar listing of anti-Marxist “arguments” with which every sophomore student is familiar. These “thematics” are repeated with numbing frequency not only in the US popular culture industry (the editorials of The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Nation; the Sunday comics; daily television cartoons; situation comedies, and MTV newsflashes…) but also in the the liberal philosophy and diverse discourses of the academy: from bourgeois feminism, mainstream anti-racism and the dominant political theory to the more avant-garde forms of “queer” theory; the New Age “care of the earth,” and post-al Indigenism. The most “sophisticated” of these anti-Marxist “arguments” are provided by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their “Post-Marxism Without Apologies” (New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, New York: Verso, 1990, 97-132) and by the advocates of “Marxism Today” whose various texts are collected in Stuart Hall’s New Times (New York: Verso, 1990)—especially Robin Murray’s “Fordism and Post-Fordism” (38-53) and John Urry’s “The End of Organized Capitalism” (94-102), whose arguments Huston echoes with great enthusiasm.
The emergence of the post-al (as in post-ideological, post-modern, post-structural and, in the instance of Shaun Huston’s text which is my main concern here, post-class) is one of the marks of the endemic crisis in bourgeois philosophy. This crisis is itself merely a superstructural articulation of the underlying contradictions in the material base of capitalism. The dominant form of bourgeois philosophy now (the eclectic mixing of the “continental” and “analytic” theories that is emerging as the “hottest” form of the bourgeois thinking) deals with these recurring crises by inventing the “new” (over and over again), that is to say, by producing a post-al state which promises a way to move beyond the crisis and to inaugurate a novel beginning free from the burden (contradictions) of the past. The post-al argument underwrites especially the work of those philosophers such as Jean-Francois Lyotard or Jacques Derrida who “formally” oppose the concept of the “post” and posit the “crisis” as “prepostal” that is as a transhistorical phenomenon that is a feature of the social “across the ages.” Lyotard, for example, formally denounces the project of the “post” (as discontinuity) and speaks instead of the “post” as a textual continuity (“‘Re-writing’ Modernism” Substance, 54, 1987, 3-9). He thus grounds his own notion of “the postmodern condition” on the ruins of modernity brought about by the “crisis” of “metanarratives:” a crisis that cuts off an “after” (post-metanarrational democratic discourses) from a “before” (metanarrational totalitarian knowledges) and by doing so starts history anew, fresh from the contradictions of the past. The rejection of “modernity” in Lyotard, Derrida, Baurdillard…under the sign of “totalitarian” is in actuality an alibi for establishing a post-al state free from the contradictions of capitalism and colonialism that mark bourgeois modernity. It is only by such clearing of ground—separating “now” from “then”; “(post)colonialism” from “colonialism”; “pre” from “post”—that Lyotard is able to say that “Capitalism is one of the names of modernity” (Political Writings, U of Minnesota P, 1993,25). Modernity, in other words, is the “before” of metanarrational knowledges that gave us “capitalism,” but we are now, according to Lyotard, in an “after” in which modernity is re-written as an anti-metanarrative free from metanarrational “capitalism.” “Metanarrative” is the boundary sign that disconnects (in spite of the formal protestations of Lyotard and others) the “after” from “before” and constructs a post-al situation in which today’s “capitalism” is posited as a fresh, new regime unencumbered by its past. This post-al capitalism comes about as a result of what Huston calls a recognition of the “substantive changes” (3) in capitalism and is deployed by him—after Derrida, Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Daniel Bell and Vaclav Havel (e.g. his “The End of the Modern Era” lecture given at World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on February 4, 1993)—to deconstruct classical Marxist concepts of “class,’ “class struggle,” and “international proletariat” so as to rewrite liberalism as a form of radical democracy.
In terms of Marxism itself—to begin to address the questions Huston raises—the post-al analytics asks “why should we in the 1990’s..be interested in vaguely nineteenth century-sounding materialist solutions to problems of this postmodern moment?” (as Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean ironically put it in their anti-Marxist tract, Materialist Feminisms, Blackwell: Cambridge, MA, 1993, 61). Landry and MacLean regard themselves (as Huston does in certain moments of his text) to be sympathetic to Marxism and committed to social change and thus interested in providing an up-to-date “materialist” and “radical” theory of social change. But their demand for up-dating Marxism (as friends of Marxism and for the good of Marxism) is actually a demand for renewing the liberal social agenda which Huston sums up as “The struggle against discrimination and social and personal violence on the part of women, non-whites, and socially constructed ‘deviants’ such as homosexuals…” (4). It is a rewriting of an old idealist analytics which is founded upon taking the “everyday” as the limit text of the “real” or as Huston puts it: “Why should social struggle and resistance be any different than activities such as going to school or going on vacation?” (4). The “sympathy” of these friends of Marxism is, in the end, a rhetorical device which is deployed in order to make their shoring up of the liberal state and the “free market” it protects in the name of “democracy” all the more effective. Huston’s “reasonableness” and his “non-polemical” stance is part of the ecumenical pluralism that is constitutive of the post-al logic of “empathy,” “feeling,” “understanding,” and “persuasion.” They are, in other words, textual devices that make his “argument” against Marxism, like that of Landry and MacLean, a “fair” one—a judicious and thoughtful reconsideration of Marxism that only wants to “improve” Marxism and offer a “better” form of “materialist” analysis. The “improved” Marxism that Huston and other friends of Marxism are offering is, however, a post-al revisionism that attempts to rewrite Marxism as a form of cultural materialism—a la Raymond Williams, Judith Butler, Cornel West, Gayatri Spivak, and the recent texts of Fredric Jameson. This improved post-al Marxism-as-cultural-materialism posits “consciousness” (a word which is never openly used in their writing but forms the very matrix of all their theories) as the source of social change and in doing so does what liberals have always done: to relegitimate the individual (subject of “consciousness”) as the free agent whose practices are “excess”ive and unrepresentable/ unexplainable by what they regard to be an “economic reductionism.”
Post-al logic naturalizes the individual-as-free-agent and thus provides capitalism with what it most needs in its superstructural justification of its property relations. It is not surprising then that the notion of the free subject of consciousness as an “excess”ive individuality that defies all categories is the “foundation” of Huston’s post-al text. “I should state,” Huston writes at the beginning of his letter/essay, “that I do not fall neatly into the ‘broad left’/Marxist left dichotomy spelled out in the Alternative Orange, Winter 1993” (1). Huston is, in other words, an “excess,” a “transcendence,” a subtle and complex individuality whose “experience” is unexplainable by restricted “concepts”—he is a subject in short, whose “free” practices mark the limits of all categories. His practices are instances of the Kantian “sublime” which are nonrepresentable in any confining (“regulated” public) space. Huston’s demand for “improving” (what he in his ahistorical argument calls “historicising” Marxism) by up-dating its categories of “class,” “social division of labor,” “capital”… is in fact the demand for a revision of Marxism to make it an extension of liberal political theory which (as I will argue in my discussion of “class-as-contradictory-class-locations) has always accommodated the enterprising agent of capitalism and displaced class struggle with cultural struggle; revolution with reform.
Postal-ity has becomes the most convincing argument in the ludic academy because to the delight of the bourgeois it posits a break, a disjuncture, a discontinuity between the present and the past and consequently “floats” the present as the moment of such post-al complexity and layered subtlety that it is beyond the reach of the simple explanatory concepts of Marxism. It is an argument founded upon the assumption that, as Huston writes, “substantive changes in the character of capitalism and the composition of the ‘proletariat’ have drastically changed the terms of class struggle since Marx” (3). “Today,” Huston writes in reaffirming the rupturing nature of our times, “the gobalization of capitalism, changes in the nature of capitalist production, and certain detours in the formation of class consciousness have made any belief in a singular ‘international proletariat’ extremely problematic” (1). The post-al argument, as Huston’s text shows, enables bourgeois philosophy to provide the ideological discourses that make the contradictions of capitalism tolerable by simply explaining them away as belonging to a past with which the present has only a remote connection. Huston’s post-al text, in other words, obtains its “truth” by positing a “break”—a Foucauldian “discontinuity” caused by the alea of “events” (Language, Counter-Memory, Practice Cornell UP: Ithaca, 1977, 154)—that is constituted by the “excess”ive-ness of the social itself. It is, in other words, a break/beyond that is not exhausted by any “explanation” that uses the “laws of motion of capital,” and, as such, it is the deregulating space of the Free market and its free (enterprising) agent. By following this logic in his essay/letter, Huston constructs the ideological space in which various apparatuses of crisis-management are produced in order to “iron out” the fundamental contradictions that cannot be resolved in present practices.
Huston’s post-al argument is not only post-historical (it posits history as the “experience” of the break brought about by the alea), but it is also post-irony: it expects us to “read” it post-aly and not ask whether he is “serious” when he says, for example, that because there are “indigenous people” who “cannot be fitted into the global division of labor under capitalism” (3) any deployment of Marxist theory of class struggle is simply an instance of “relying on AUTHORITY of some pre-existing canon to explain social form and radical change” (5). The post-irony text is beyond the binary of irony-seriousness: it is a “writing” and as such is not confined by the objective “truth:” it is a theatre of differential signification. The “grand narrative” of class, as far as Huston is concerned, is discredited by the “little narrative” of the indigenous. However, if one reads Huston’s text in terms of the economies of its outside (the objective existence of surplus labor), his argument collapses into a “joke,” and a bad “joke” at that. His “argument” is that because there are in the “periphery” of capitalism some indigenous people who “have free access to means of production” (3); by which he must mean such rudimentary “means” as plows, horses, …; and do not “rent their labor out” (3), the “laws of motion of capital” in the “center”—that is the “social division of labor”—is proven wrong. I repeat the underlying structure of this post-al logic: the “periphery” of capitalism (indigenous people who are by any account a very very small part of the international economy) is the site of such “excess”ive activities that it deconstructs the “laws” of motion of the “center.”
The reason why Huston’s “argument” does not look ridiculous in the very first instance and is repeated in various forms by different theorists as a post-irony observation is because the ludic common sense has so completely overtaken the post-al knowledge industry that it has become almost impossible to provide knowledges that enable readers to critique the underlying assumptions of the ludic “logic” operating here. Where does Huston’s ludic argument acquire its authority—the “authority” that he is so anxious to denounce in his (anarchic)logic?
The “authority” of Huston’s anti-authoritarian, (anarchic)logic derives from the mainstream ludic intelligibility, which is written according to the laws of Derridean “supplementarity” and renders any dialectical reading an act of totalitarian violence by substituting the “supplement” for “sublation.” Derrida’s “dangerous supplement” subverts the “center” through desedimenting the textuaries of the “margin”; in other words, it rewrites the “central” by freeing the overflowing significations of the “peripheral.”
Huston’s “argument” that the indigenous (the “margin”) discredits the laws of motion of capital (the “center”) is a repetition of the by now canonic ludic logic in bourgeois political theory (Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, New York: Routledge, 1993; Michael Warner, ed. Fear of a Queer Planet, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993; Fred Dallmayr, G.W.F. Hegel: Modernity and Politics, New York: Sage, 1993; N.B. Dirks, Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993). The politics of this deconstructive logic—in which the “margin” rearticulates the “center” by “supplementing” it (Derrida, Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976, 141-164)—constructs a semiotic “power” for the economically exploited “marginal.” But this is merely an idealist discursive freedom in lieu of the material emancipation that the “center” has refused the marginal. “Supplementarity,” in other words, is a device through which what liberal democracy has denied its citizens—in the actual practices of the free market (the social division of labor)—is given back to them in the form of a freedom of “phrases,” as Marx and Engels put it in their critique of the “Young Hegelians” (The German Ideology, Moscow: Progress Press, 1976, 36). The “margin” de-centers the “center” only in “phrases” not in praxis; in the actual conduct of daily life, the “center,” of course, continues to remain the “center” and determine the “margin.” This is the ludic logic through which Derrida, for example, “deconstructs” “apartheid” (“Racism’s Last Word” in H.L. Gates, Jr., ed., “Race,”Writing, and Difference, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986, 329-369). The “supplementary” reading of “margin” and the “periphery,” however, is not limited to philosophical texts. It has become the underlying logic of the daily intelligibilities in newspaper accounts and TV news of the world. When CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN…devote a strategically effective segment of the evening news to depict, for instance, a person who has been able, in spite of tremendous odds, to set up a “successful” candy store in an urban combat zone, they are essentially saying that the “margin” is where the power lies and the individual (free agent) can defy the laws of the “center”. When a high school in a poor neighborhood manages to send two students to college, the mainstream media sends platoons of reporters to represent this “random” event (Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977, 154-5) as the proof of individual “exception” and “excess”. The media, in short, are using the same ludic logic that Huston is deploying in his text: all are pointing to the “eccentric” (the indigenous, the owner of the candy store, the two high school kinds…) to conclude that the social is not “explainable” by the “laws of motion of capital.” The “center,” in other words, is not “systematically” exploitative, and the “idiosyncratic” margin proves it.
Thus while the “center” continues its exploitative practices, the post-al logic, as in Huston’s text, diverts our attention—in the name of liberal inclusivity and the liberation of silenced voices—toward the indigenous who own their own horses and plows and are thus the living proof of outdatedness of Marxism. Huston’s deconstruction of the “center” by marking the errancy of the “periphery” tries to show the incoherence of theory and thus the “excess”iveness of the “experience” of the “singularity” of the “local.”
Of course, it is not difficult to show how Huston’s own text is utterly incoherent in terms of this logic of the “supplement.” On the opening page, Huston posits the “globalization” of capitalism—which does not leave any “outside” to itself—and on the basis of such a complete inclusivity, he concludes that capitalism today has been de-localized and has thus undergone “substantive changes” since Marx’s time. But, in a moment of textual forgetfulness, he appeals to the existence of the very “outside” that he has already negated. In order to prove that the “social division of labor” is an outdated concept, he invokes the eccentric, local practices of an “indigenous” people whom he must posit as “outside” capitalism. In so doing, the margin of his text displaces the “center” of his own argument for a “globalization” of capitalism that does not leave anything “outside” itself. However, I have not read Huston’s text in terms of its immanent contradictions and aporia because such a reading ultimately is a formalist examination of the internal laws of its logic. My interest in his text is in what makes such a “logic” seem Logical. I am interested in the “outside” of the logic: the political economy of its meaningfulness and not simply the internal laws of its signification.
Huston’s logical move, in which the “margin” displaces the “center,” is typical of all post-al demands for revising Marxism and updating its concepts such as “class,” “revolution,” “value.” Through “supplementary” readings of Marxist texts, the post-al revisionists rewrite Marxism in terms of an accommodationist liberal pluralism and multiculturalism that replaces “critique” with “conversation” and, as I have already indicated, puts forth “reform” as the only means for social change. The post-al calls for a revision of Marxism take one of two main forms, and before arguing that the Marxist concepts of “class,” “social division of labor,” and “class struggle” are as explanatory and valid today as they were in Marx’s own days, I would like to briefly look at these revisionist “calls” since a preliminary knowledge of them is necessary for completing my own argument.
The more familiar type of revisionism takes the form of locating conceptual “holes” in Marxism. The best-known of such readings have come from ludic feminists and post-al queer theorists who have maintained that “gender” and “sexuality” are missing from Marxism. According to such writers as Gayle Rubin (“Thinking Sex,” in Pleasure and Danger ed. C. C. Vance, New York: Routledge, 1984); Andrew Parker, “Unthinking Sex: Marx, Engels, and the Scene of Writing,” in Fear of a Queer Planet, D. M. Warner, Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1993) and Linda Nicholson, “Feminism and Marx: Integrating Kinship with the Economic” (in Feminism as Critique, ed. S. Benhabib & D. Cornell, Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1987) a “supplementary” feminist reading of Marxism shows how the Marxist “whole” argument—its knowledge of social “totality”—is in fact full of “holes.” It is a nonknowledge that is represented as knowledge by the sheer violence of its exclusion of “women,” “gender,” “housework,” “sexuality,” “(re)production”…. Linda Nicholson’s essay, “Feminism and Marx: Integrating Kinship with the Economic,” to take a canonic text of ludic feminism, argues (along the lines rehearsed in Huston) that Marxism has lost its historical relevance to the (post)modern social because Marx’s concepts such as “production” are, “from a feminist perspective,” a “fundamentally ambiguous” concept (17). This “ambiguity” is, Nicholson maintains, symptomatic of Marxism’s “failure in comprehending gender” (29). “Production” in precapitalist societies and “reproduction” in capitalist societies, she argues, are activities that are “organized conjointly through the medium of kinship” (29). The separation of “economics” from “family,” therefore, marks a “serious” problem “within the theory” (19). Marxism, in other words, suffers from a “lack,” and the only way to overcome the limits of its “separation of economics as a cross-cultural phenomena” is to “reconstruct” it historically (30). Like most revisionists, Nicholson has now gone beyond the “reconstruction” of Marxism and concluded that Marxism is irrelevant to ludic feminism. She has, therefore, abandoned historical materialism by embracing (post)modern and (post)marxist ludic social theory (see, for example, her “Identity Politics and Political Economy, Strategies, No. 7, 1993, 31-41).
Nicholson’s essay is, nonetheless paradigmatic of the kind of demand that Huston is repeating: the demand that Marxist concepts be “historicized.” A similar call is made by race theorists such as E. San Juan, Jr., who in his book, Racial Formations/Critical Transformations (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1992), critiques “Orthodox” Marxism for “subsuming” “racial conflicts” to the “class problematic.” “Race,” he argues, is (like gender for Nicholson) to be treated as autonomous, and “class struggle cannot pre-empt, or leap over, the color line.” For San Juan it is “race” that is the “hole” in the Marxist theory of totality. Most of the contributors to Ward Churchill’s Marxism and Native Americans (Boston: South End Press, 1983) find this gap in Marxism’s disregard for spirituality. Marxism, in Russell Means’s famous speech, “The Same Old Song” is represented as “more of that same old European conflict between being and gaining” (21): the “materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe” (22). Robert B. Sipe, in the same volume, puts it in more succinct terms in his “Culture and Personhood” (91-111), “Psycho-cultural contradictions—the subjective conditions—have urgent importance” for social change (109). More urgent than “class struggle,” as far as most of the other contributors are concerned. In the same manner, Green theorists have argued that Marxism has lost its relevance for the post-al moment: “The Greens,” writes Rudolf Bahro, “are to Marx and Marxism what Einstein was to Newton and Newtonian physics” (Spretnak and Capra, Green Politics, London: Paladin, 1985, 25). For “Queer” theorists it is what they perceive to be a marginalization of “desire” that makes Marxism unfit to “explain” the post-al moment (Andrew Parker, “Unthinking Sex”).
In all these critiques, a particular concern (gender, sexuality, desire, race…) is found to be “marginalized” in the classical Marxist theory. The “margin” is desedimented as a “dangerous supplement” and the overflow of its signification, as Huston rehearses in his text, rewrites the “other”—which was violently excluded—back into the “center.” In so doing, it points out the “absence” in the “center” which represented itself as “plenitude” that merely need “supplementing” (in the commonsensical meaning of “added to”).
In a sense the critique of Marxism in terms of these “absences” (missing concepts) is an attempt to reconstitute Marxism (in a broadly Laclauian manner) as a radical democratic and multicultural pluralist theory in which all social axes (gender, race, environment, sexuality, animal rights,…) are equally important. Such a rewriting of Marxism turns it into a post-revolutionary praxis acting around the post-marxist retheorization of “hegemony”—a coalition which is post-class. This mode of critique, in spite of its radical-sounding conclusions is a rather traditional thematic critique. What ludic feminists, queer theorists, eco-critics and anti-racists find missing in Marxism is what they quietly privilege in their own reformist social theory—the liberal pluralism that they take for granted as the given truth of post-al societies. However, these concepts are not “missing” from Marxism. “Gender,” for instance, to take the case that has become canonical in post-al social theory because of the institutional power of ludic feminism, is certainly not “missing.” Marxism offers a radical critique of patriarchy: a concept that is itself now missing from ludic feminism on the convenient grounds that it essentializes gender, as if the privileging of desire, language and experience in post-al feminism is not essentializing. Even more important, Marxism offers a revolutionary praxis for reorganizing human societies in such a way that gender would no longer be deployed to justify asymmetrical economic resources. Those feminists who find Marxism lacking in terms of gender are thus representing the absence of a reformist gender theory in Marxism as the absence of a gender theory as such. Their critique of Marxism, in other words, is a critique of its revolutionary theory and anti-pluralism. These feminists, in short, demand a theory that produces gender equality without overthrowing capitalism. In Tony Cliff’s words, “the equality they see is within the present class structure, that is, equality for the more fortunate” (Class Struggle & Women’s Liberation 1640-to the Present London: Bookmarks, 1984, 191-92). To elaborate, they take Marxism’s fundamental opposition to class society as an opposition to feminism since their bourgeois theory of gender is so dependent on class privilege—in which demand and desire displace need.
Marxism has always been at the vanguard of the struggle for a nonhomophobic, non-sexist, non-racist society and has offered some of the most radical (and pioneering) critiques of the abuse of the earth and the pollution of the environment under capitalism (Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844). As in the case of its critique of gender, however, Marxism has insisted on The Limits of Environmentalism Without Class, as John Bellamy Foster puts it in the title of his book (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993). The issues of gender, environment, race, sexuality, desire are treated in Marxism historically and materially: they are theorized as differences which are produced at the site of “production” but are then “naturalized” in order to mystify “production” and, consequently, to justify the property relations in class societies.
The more radical critique of Marxism, however, is not a “thematic” critique evolving around the absence of a certain concept. It is rather founded upon the lesson on the “principles of reading” that Derrida gives in Of Grammatology (158). In “reading” a text, Derrida teaches, one must take care that one does not “separate, through interpretation or commentary, the signified from the signifier” (159). This, among other things, means that the “task of reading” should not transgress the boundaries of a text “toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical, psychological, etc.) or toward a signified outside the text whose content could take place, could have taken place outside of language, that is to say in the sense that we give here to that word, outside of writing in general” (158). From such a perspective then the race, feminist, queer, eco, critiques made of Marxism are “naive” since they read Marx not as a “text” but “as a document” (149). The “documentary” reading assumes there is something “outside of the text”—the referent of “gender,” “environment” free from the play of signifiers. In other words, feminist, eco, queer, race critiques of Marxism cannot go beyond Marxism because they do not radically “supplement” the “center”—they simply take a “concept” and pressure it through another “concept.” A radical reading is that which “supplements” the “concept” itself with a “trope” and, in so doing, indicates that all concepts are in fact a species of “tropes:” rhetoric masquerading as reality. The radical critique of Marxism is to textualize it: to foreground the tropic conditions of its conceptual possibility and thus demonstrate that as a language effect it is unable to ever be anything other than an “allegory” of its own textuality. Historical materialism—in this reading maneuver which erases any “outside of language”—is transformed into a materialism of language that, among other things, means all concepts of Marxism such as “class,” “commodity,” “value” are signifiers whose referent are other signifiers and not any decidable signified since the real, which is supposed to be “behind” language, is itself nothing other than “substitutive significations” (159).
Perhaps the most celebrated textualization of Marxist theory is the one undertaken by Gayatri Spivak in her essay, “Speculations on Reading Marx: After Reading Derrida” (in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. D. Attridge and others, New York: Cambridge UP, 1987, 30-62). In this essay Spivak reads Grundrisse and Capital, vol. 1, and focuses on such “concepts” in Marxist theory as “money,” “labour theory of value, “use-value” and “exchange-value” and renders these concepts as knots of textuality—not, that is, as the proximations of “truth” but as tropic constructs caught in the chain of significations and inter-determinations. She begins by declaring that Marx’s writings are marked by “too restricted” binaries—for example, the social fact of private property, on the one hand, and the natural fact of “having” a stomachache (31-32), on the other, or by the opposition of “use-value” and “exchange value” (36).
In one of the moments of her reading of Marx, Spivak focuses on the famous passage in Capital, 1, in which Marx discusses exchange value and use value: “In the exchange-relation of commodities their exchange-value appears to us as totally independent of their use-value. But if we abstract their use-value from the product of labor, we obtain their value, as it has just been defined. The common element that represents itself in the exchange-relation or exchange-value of the commodity is thus use-value” (Capital, 1, 128). Spivak “reads” this as: “Here use-value, implicitly as that which sublates the commodity-form through unmediated consumption, is itself operating as a theoretical fiction, as that positive thing which is to be subtracted from the undifferentiated product before the origin of value. It is thus that value is here a differential and a representation” (“Speculations” 40).
As a “differential” and a “representation,” the “concept” is not an “explanation” of an economic law, but the effect of language, and as such, and like all language constructs, it is an allegory of its self-signification and inter-determining operations, which is the performative of a “trope” in the relay of signification. As an outcome of inter-determining operations (difference), Marx’s economic theory, like all economics, is “a text” (41). Spivak also allegorizes Marx’s consideration of “money” in terms of the logocentric problematics of speech/writing, presence/absence, and thus marks his “concept” (money) as the effect of a tropics of metalepsis. Marx’s “theory” (of money) in other words, is a form of writing, and as “writing” it is a “theoretical fiction” which cannot have any “explanatory” and thus transformative claim. Like all “fictions” Marx’s labor theory of value is, according to Spivak, a pleasureful narrative that, at most, “describes” an emplotting as a desire for an “explanation:” “Money,” writes Spivak, “like writing is thus a sign of a sign” (32).
“Use value” and “exchange-value,” to take a final example from Spivak’s text, are approached, in such deconstructive readings, as a hierarchical opposition in which “the less favoured or logically posterior concept can be shown to be implicit in the other, supply a lack in the other that was always already there.” She thus concludes that the opposition between use-value and exchange-value “can be deconstructed and both can be shown to share the mark of impropriety” (54). [Impropriety = im-proper in the Derridean sense of the absence of a literal reference.]
In another text, “New Historicism: Political Commitment and the Postmodern Critic,” Spivak rehearses her textualization of Marx’s theory by stating that, “[T]he texts of Marx are precisely the place where there is no sure foundation to be found” (The Post-Colonial Critic, New York: Routledge, 1990, 162). Her evidence for the “foundationlessness” of Marx’s texts is “Marx’s incredible notion of that ‘slight, contentless thing’—Marx’s way of describing value, a value that is not necessarily trapped in the circuit of the general equivalent in all possible contents” (162).
Spivak’s “reading” of Marx follows the path I have described elsewhere[1] as “pun(k)deconstruction” in which she renders Marx’s “concepts” as a form of “puncepts” (“Speculations” 57). Sublation in Marx is, in other words, reduced to “supplementarity”—margin, to go back to Huston, rearranges the center. I am not concerned here with problematizing Spivak’s problematization of Marx—I have undertaken this task elsewhere1. [sic.] But I would like to point out that Spivak’s textualization of Marx’s text are achieved primarily by a violent “formalism” through which Marx’s concepts are dehistoricized and reduced to moments of immanent self-referentiality, and his books are thus rewritten as instances of floating textuaries. Marx’s statement, for example, that “money as medium of circulation becomes coin, mere vanishing moment, mere symbol of the value it exchanges…[money]is itself quite without content” is in Spivak’s textualization forcibly separated from its “outside” (what Marx calls the “working Day” (Capital, 1, 340-416) which in fact is the “content” of “money” and the the “praxis” that makes the “symbol” a recognizable and circulating one. However, in terms of a closed formalist system of immanence, Marx becomes a “writer” whose texts are a sign of a sign which is in turn merely the sign of another sign, etc. As Marx and Engels themselves have argued, however, “language is practical consciousness”(The German Ideology,49)—it is not a self-referential relay system but the site of class struggle. Metalepsis is caught not so much in the chain of signifiers as in the contradictions of wage-labor and capital; the “meaning” of catachresis is determined by the effective level of class struggle and to assume, as Spivak does, that there is no “outside” to the chain of signification is merely to allegorize as a theory of language the conditions of life under capitalism. To displace the prison house of capital to the prison house of language.
The socially-determined character of Spivak’s reading becomes quite clear if we read her readings historically. In “Speculations”—which composed between 1978 and 1985, the height of neoconservatism marked by the reign of Reagan-Thatcher-Kohl and the domination of poststructuralism in the bourgeois academy—Spivak’s “reading” constructs Marx’s writings as texts without “foundation” in order to up-date Marx: that is, to show that deconstruction and Marxism are in fact not that far apart. Marxism in her reading (and in such other treatments of Marxism at the time as Michael Ryan’s Marxism and Deconstruction) turn Marxism into a protodeconstruction theory. (Huston, as I have already implied, wants to up-date Marxism along the same lines but not around textuality so much as a post-marxist and anarchiactivist post-class “hegemony” in order to demonstrate that Marxism is in fact a proto-form of post-marxism!) The “affluence” of the 1980’s produced a class of theorists and readers (Derrida, Lyotard, Spivak, Fish, Jameson, Said, J.H. Miller, de Man) whose reading skills have proved so useful for legitimating neoconservatism in the guise of a radical cultural politics that they have became the subjects of considerable competition among various universities. As a result, the Americans in the group are paid six-figure salaries by such institutions as Yale, Duke, Columbia, and UC-Irvine for permanent positions while the Europeans are treated as stars-in-residence. For these “readers” (and many who have followed them), their essential needs are more than adequately met; their main concern is thus to legitimate a post-need society of “desire:” a society free from “regulations” of collective needs and in which the “desire” of the individual has free reign. As far as these readers—and the class interests they have taken as “given”—are concerned, “foundations” are part of the “regulation” that constrains “desire” and ties its “free” reign to an “outside” (economics, history,…). Foundationalism simply gets in the way of free (entrepreneurial) “readings” and inhibits their worth in the market. Since this worth is acquired by the production of more and more innovative, ingenious readings, a “reading” is limited (and limiting) to the extent it has to account for “foundations.” This has lead to the “war against totality” of “foundations” and the dismissal of foundations as simply “boring” (nonpleasureful), irrelevant and especially as a totalitarian frame negating the freedom of the subject to produce more and more “singular” and “unique” interpretations which naturalize the excessive desires of the free subject of capital.
This is also the time, by the way, of the increasing popularity of what Huston calls “anarchism”. For the first time in Western history anarchism is no longer a philosophical movement known among a relatively small group but has become a popular daily practice among the rising generation in the West: its anti-authoritarianism and anti-statist approach to daily life have made it quite appealing to the children of “affluence.” Huston’s anti-authoritarianism and his (anarchic)logic are situated in this space. Anti-authoritarianism, like anti-foundationalism, is an ideological alibi for a pro-business ethics. In removing the State, it is actually removing a “regulatory” agency whose “regulations” (like “foundations”) constantly interfere with the free pursuit of profit. Anarchism is not at all anti-authoritarian, as Huston represents it: it is anti regulations, especially those that hinder the free trade. Huston’s anarchism opposes the State not because it is anti-authoritarian but because it is opposed to the authority of the collective (which is supposed to be represented by the State). But, authority will not wither away after the anarchic removal of State: it will simply become the AUTHORITY of Big Business which no longer has to worry about the “regulation” of the State. Anarchism is the philosophy of the transnational corporation “state”.
The direction and priorities of Spivak’s “readings” are changing in her post-1980’s readings. In her “Foundations and Cultural Studies” (Questioning Foundations: Truth/Subjectivity/Culture, ed. H. Silverman, New York: Routledge, 1993, 153-175)—written between 1990 and 1993 during years of economic recession when jobs in and outside the academy have become much more scarce, that is, when the “materiality” of social practices can no longer be so easily marginalized through anti-foundationalist ludic “readings”—Spivak no longer pursues “anti-foundationalism” with the zeal she has shown in her previous texts. The anti-foundationalist themes are now subdued. She now even reads the canonic texts of (post)structuralism as “grounded” texts and, for example, declares: “Deconstruction as I understand it is not exactly ‘nonfoundationalist’“ (153). It is not “reading” (the practice of language) that makes sense of texts; it is history (the mode of production and its movements) that enables certain forms of “reading” to be acceptable as “reading.” It is also, I might add, in the 1990’s that other (post)structuralists and (post)modernists are taking back their claims of being anti-foundationalist, and suddenly “materialism” is becoming the “trope” of the day (as indicated by the titles of such books as Cornel West’s Race Matters and Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter). This does not mean that the academy and its idealist theory of the social has changed. Rather what it means is that (as Marx and Engels have analyzed the situation of idealist theory in relation to the Young Hegelians) for dominant ideology to work effectively it has to now be relayed through the discourses of “materialism.”
But this is a very special type of “materialism”—one that takes the body and language as its limit texts. It is a post-al materialism of the signifier, which is another way of saying that in the 1990’s the ludic academy conserves its idealism through an idea of post-al matter. This materialism, in other words, is constructed in order to more effectively suppress historical materialism, which foregrounds the structure of social conflicts in class societies and produces knowledges for revolutionary praxis. Huston’s call for revising Marxism is also issued from this new site of ludic materialism which is a form of contextual localism: Huston wants Marxism to account not for the global but for the micropolitical. The micropolitical, the experiential constitute the “material” in this ludic materialism and are articulated through “language” and “body.” Theorists such as Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler—those reliable providers of the (post)structuralist “intellectual high” in the ludic academy these days—are declaring themselves materialist and further more extending the claim to “cover” the writings of Lacan and other ludic theorists.
Christopher Norris, to point to another well-known case, retreats from his earlier anti-foundationalist position and tries to save his interpretive investment in Derrida by writing What’s Wrong with Postmodernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1990, 49-76; 134-163) and Uncritical Theory (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1992, 32-51; 86-125) in which he rescues Derrida from postmodernism by arguing that Derrida has never in fact been a (post)structuralist. Similarly, in Forget Baudrillard (ed. C. Rojek and others, New York: Routledge, 1993), Baudrillard, the canonic theorist of (post)modernism, is re-presented as a non-post-modernist. The economics of the times are changing and so are the “reading” modes of those theorists who need to keep their market value high: to be in demand as producers of cutting-edge knowledges. This is, of course also the narrative which is now circulating as the “end of theory:” it is the story of that marketeer of theory, Stanley Fish, who having exhausted “theory” as an academic commodity is currently declared the end of theory and the the arrival of the age of “posttheory.” Fish, who is now a publishing Czar (as the new Director of Duke University Press) is well situated to make sure that only posttheory texts are disseminated through his “hot” press. The publishing agenda of this Commissar of Knowledge in the U.S. academy is made clear in a recent interview during which he has declared the death of theory and the arrival of high “aesthetics” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 13, 1993, A-17). Aesthetics, of course, has always been the primary site of the deregulated desire of the reading subject in the ludic academy.
Huston’s anarchism, like anti-foundationalism, is—to use Huston’s own terms—becoming somewhat out-dated, and he knows that his anarchism (like Spivak’s anti-foundationalism) has to be made flexible. It is out of such a concern, that he shows his “sympathy” to class and class struggle and represents himself as a “friend” who is asking for revision in order to produce a better (“historicized”) Marxism. “I do not,” he writes, “begrudge…’hard’ Marxist orientation” (5) but he wants this “hard”-ness to be modified into a critical theory which is (as his texts shows) his code for liberalism. Like Spivak, Huston is an eclectic liberal whose main theoretical agenda is the conservation of bourgeois liberties and desires.
While Huston’s call to “historicize” Marxist categories is grounded, as I have already indicated, on such post-al moves of deconstruction as displacement of the center by strategic use of the margin, it does not finally take the path of a radical textuality articulated by Spivak and such other textualist readers of Marx as Michael Ryan and Andrew Parker. Instead, he asks for a “reform” of Marxism by supplying its “missing” concepts and updating its existing ones. His call, in other words, is founded upon his post-al sociologic: the world has changed and, therefore, concepts have to change.
Huston’s call for a revision of Marxism is based primarily on his view that there have been such changes in class structure and class formation in capitalism—as a result of which class consciousness has been eclipsed—that to continue talking about an “international class struggle” or the “proletariat” today is to misread the present social formation of capitalism. Such misreading is seen as relying on one’s analysis, on “the AUTHORITY of some pre-existing canon” (5), and not on the actual, local, concrete daily realties. In place of “class struggle” as the fundamental struggle of our times, he wants a pluralist social contestation which includes not only class but such other social axes of “difference” as gender, race, sexuality, ecology…and—what is theoretically as well as politically most important in his proposal—posits that these various axes of “differences” co-exist and do not compete with one another (4). He wants to transform Marxism into a pluralist social theory which accommodates the thesis of multiple oppression, underwrites multiculturalism and shares the Derridean slogan that “truth is plural” (Derrida, Spurs, U of Chicago P, 1979, 103): that is, the truth of the exploiter and the exploited are equally truthful. This is another way of saying that the “difference” is in each and not between the two, which is the epistemological condition necessary for erasing the line between the powerful and the powerless, the bourgeois and the proletariat—to declare, in short, the end of class struggle.
Huston’s logic in his discussion of class is a post-al and ludic one. He does not deny the existence of classes (how could he?) nor does he deny the fact of class struggle. However, his post-al logic destabilizes class and rewrites it in such a way that it loses all its revolutionary dimensions and becomes just one site of oppression among many others. He does this by two interrelated moves: a) he redefines class so as to disconnect it from the mode of production and b) he fractures class location so that no single class position is available any longer, and all people are simultaneously situated in multiple class positions.
Although Huston offers no formal redefinition of “class,” he implies one. After an overview of the status of class consciousness among the workers and business people in the U.S., he concludes: “The bulk of the rest of the population is mired in an amorphous ‘middle class’ consciousness regardless of income or status” (emphasis added, 2). Huston here implicitly theorizes class as a matter of “income” and or “status.” (I put aside here for the moment his idealist notion of “consciousness” so clearly cut off from the world around it.) This theory of class replaces the Classical Marxist theory of class—as a positionality in relations of production—with distributionist and occupationist categories. Huston’s view of class, which is dominant among bourgeois sociologists, is, of course, a Weberian one, and like Weber’s theory of capitalism itself (The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism), which posits capitalism as the effect of psychological conditions and the outcome of such personal and individualistic practices as “saving” and habits of parsimony, it is aimed at privileging “consciousness” and making the individual the central force of history. Although Huston’s text shows some tension by hinting at contesting concepts of class, it begins with this idealist notion of class which leads Huston to regard changes (in occupations and status) in the work place, such as the emergence of the “temporary” worker, the service worker, the highly paid knowledge worker, the manager…, as conclusive evidence that Marx’s bipolar theory of class—which divided all people into the “bourgeois” (owners of the means of production) and the “proletariat” (those who have nothing but their labor power)—has been fractured by post-al capitalism. Managers and knowledge workers are seen as neither “proletariat” nor “bourgeois” but as having plural class positions. Thus having redefined class as a feature of status and occupation, Huston then makes this second radical move: he proposes that, as a result of new changes in the workforce (the emergence of new occupations, etc.), one can no longer place people in a single class position.
Huston’s notion of plural class positions is founded upon the notion of class and class location that has emerged in bourgeois theories of social stratification in the social sciences around the same time as the rise of (post)structuralism in the ludic academy. The rewriting of a (single) class position as (plural) class positions, in other words, is the superstructural articulation of the same tensions and contradictions in the material base that have produced (post)structuralism, with its equally pluralist concepts such as “trace,” “supplement,” “pharmakon” and, of course, “differance.” The displacement of the classical Marxist notion of (a single) class position by (plural) “contradictory class locations” is the way in which neo-marxists (E. O. Wright) and analytical marxists (John Roemer) have accommodated the needs of emerging multinational corporations in the Post World War II years. What “differance” has done for the applied sciences of interpretation, “contradictory class locations” have done for the social sciences.
Class-as-contradictory-class-locations has lost its “grounds” in the social relations of production and instead is located in the “skills,” “status,” “income,” “taste” and especially in the concept which sums them all up: “assets.” “Assets” allow the bourgeois social scientist to legitimate the economic interests of the ruling classes by positing that the world is not (as Marxists have argued) divided between those who have and those who have nothing. In the new theory, the social is theorized in terms of “game theory” in which everyone has some “assets.” This enables theorists such as John Roemer to substitute game theory fantasies for the objective facts of exploitation. The thesis of “contradictory class locations” and its underlying “game theory” pose such questions as is a “manger” a proletariat or a capitalist? Exploited or exploiter? Isn’t a male worker who is exploited in his own work place exploiting his wife at home? What is he then—exploited or exploiter? Unlike classical Marxist class analysis in which each person is either “exploited” or “exploiting” (depending on his/her relation to labor power), the theory of class as multiple contradictory class positions posits each person in an number of contradictory class positions so that everyone is simultaneously “exploiting” and “exploited.” Class itself performs the superstructural notion of differance which has become so necessary in the age of multinational capital. Difference, according to the game theory of class, is within the subject of labor (differance does not allow a clear line to be drawn between the “exploited” and “exploiter”). Consequently class becomes the site of slippage and class errancy. In other words, multiple contradictory class locations turn the subject of labor into a site of self-difference and thus into a subject at war simultaneously with the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. “Hierarchies,” Huston writes “exist within rather than between social classes” (emphasis added, 5). In the game theory of class that underwrites Huston’s critique of Classical Marxism, class becomes an “excessive” concept: it is a class which exceeds class; it is a post-al class. It is this “excess” which is used to erase class-as-a-location-in-production by such theorists as Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick who instead talk about class as a “process” (Knowledge and Class, Chicago: U of Chicago p, 1978). No longer can one draw a clear line between the powerful and the powerless (Foucault, History of Sexuality. vol. 1, New York: Random House, 1978, 92-102). In the (anarchic)logic of the social sciences, Foucault and Derrida have displaced Marx and deconstructed class, rendering it an undecidable trope. What is involved in such moves, is of course, the transformation of “class” from an economic category to a “political” one, and part of this move is, as I have already implied, the displacement of “exploitation” by “domination”—economics by power, materialism by politics. Huston’s notion of class takes “domination” (power, or what Huston calls “authority”) as the basis of its understanding of class. This displacement of “exploitation” in the Classical Marxist theory of class is aimed at making “politics” rather than economics the primary site of social struggle (thus Huston’s anarchist emphasis on the “State”). The foregrounding of politics in social struggle is a familiar move (made popular through Foucauldian micropolitics) in bourgeois social theory and activism and is the main strategy through which class and class struggle is obscured and replaced by cultural politics or discursive struggle. To put the question of nonmanual “middle class” persons as the main question of class analysis/class struggle as Huston does is to systematically obscure the priority of “production” and to consequently displace revolutionary praxis with micropolitical activism.
Having posited class as a differential trope, Huston then proceeds to announce that there are many hierarchies and practices that are autonomous of class. In a Marxist theory of class, however all the hierarchies and stigmatizations that he enumerates (gender, ageism, AIDS,…) are all organized hierarchically because they are used to justify the asymmetrical organization of economic resources; these “differences” in other words are naturalized to legitimate the interests of the ruling class. The tired rehearsals that this or that practice did or did not take place in the Soviet Union are not arguments; they are part of a sustained capitalist propaganda aimed at inhibiting women and men from learning from previous practices and from going beyond them to construct a socialist future. Capitalists are always advised to look hard at past problems and crises (e.g. the 1930’s depression) and to try to rationally learn from them so that they can become more competitive and more efficient in the future in their profit producing undertakings. Socialists, on the other hand, are warned not to waste their time examining the practices of the recent past in an effort to move beyond them, because what has happened in the very first sustained experiment in socialism in all of human history proves once and for all that socialism is a flawed mode of reorganizing human societies. This conclusion does not sound rational; it is more of an emotional appeal to human ignorance. Human nature, we are told over and over and over again is incompatible with socialism. Yes, the very first experiment in socialism in human history has in part (only in part) failed; but “capitalism,” as Comrade George Marchais recently reminded us, “is not the answer. We must go toward a new society, and we believe it will be a communist society.” Certainly capitalist democracy, which after more than three hundred years of trying has yet to fulfill its very basic promise—equality for all—is in no position to talk about the inherent flaws of socialism, based as it is on only seventy or so years of experimentation.
Marx’s notion of class is aimed at providing a revolutionary analysis and the guidelines for moving towards this communist society. It is, therefore, a radically different concept of class from the one grounding Huston’s text. Of course, this is not the place to offer an exposition of Marx’s layered understanding of class, but I need to at least state that for Marx class is not the outcome of “income” or “status” but rather the effect of people’s position in the social relation of production. In the “Working Day,” people either produce surplus value, in which case they are part of the “proletariat,” or they exploit the surplus value—that is they own the means of production and are in a position to make other people work for them. Class, in other words, is the effect of the subject’s relation to the source of “profit” (surplus labor). The fact that the extracted surplus value gets distributed by capitalists through such “relays” as knowledge-workers and managers in no way obliterates the fundamental social and economic division between the capitalist and wage-laborer.
But Huston (following Wright and others) obscures this reality by focusing on the modalities of mediations (how a portion of the surplus value gets distributed among such workers as managers, etc.) instead of addressing the workings of the relations of “production.” The fact of managers, for example, or the emerging practice in the U.S. work place (modeled after successful Japanese management practices) of including workers in the “decision making” in no way eliminate exploitation and the antagonism of the two classes. They simply make this antagonism more tolerable by reducing the level of contradictions and crisis in daily life so that these do not distract from the efficient use of labor. A worker who is “involved” in decision making processes is still exploited, and the surplus of his labor continues to be appropriated, but he is exploited through the mediation (of persuasion), which helps to modify his class consciousness. To take this mediation as a new form of class position is to blur the lines between the “exploited” and the “exploiters” and thus to legitimate the dominant relations of property.
Among the “arguments” Huston offers to render Classical Marxism outdated is his point that “temporary” workers, because of the very “temporariness” of their work, constitute an “excess” since, according to him, a “contingent” workforce is a radically new development that annuls the validity of the Marxist concept of “class struggle”. My point here is that the “contingent” workforce is a structural feature of capitalism, and there is nothing in what Huston says that Marx himself has not theorized. In such texts as Class Struggle in France, The Civil War in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx discusses the “contingent” worker: his name for the contingent workers is lumpenproletariat. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, for instance, Marx describes the lumpenproletariat, in a language that is echoed in Huston’s text, as a “disintegrated mass” (New York: International Publishers, 1990, 75). In fact Marx uses the French word “remplacants” (substitutes) in conjunction with the lumpenproletariat (131), just as Huston deploys the word “substitutes” to describe what he regards to be a new phenomenon in the labor force. The lumpenproletariat is a free-floating mass whose very dispersal makes it vulnerable to the kind of counter-revolutionary (even fascist) politics that Huston seems to hint at (2). It is, of course, true that the “temporary workers”—the “substitutes”—will be shocked at the suggestion that they are indeed the post-al lumpenproletariat since they have taken to heart the lessons of the dominant ideology that their free-floating is a mark of their “freedom,” their “flexibility” and their “independence”. In fact their class position as lumpenproletariat is systematically obscured by bourgeois theorists such as Huston who theorize class in terms of “income” and “status” and, in so doing, cover up over the fact that “income,” “status,” “taste,” “professional standing”…are all various strategies through which capitalism hides its binary class structure.
A theory of class, such as the one grounding Huston’s text, in which the contingent worker is seen as a new “excessive” class whose existence puts an end to class analysis and class struggle, is most useful for a theory of the subject in the post-al academy. The post-al contingent worker, understandably, will not regard him/herself as part of the tendency in capitalism that Trotsky calls “the transformation of ever larger groups of workers into the lumpenproletariat” (The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971, 34). But as Marx—in recognition of the work of ideology in the formation of subjectivity—has taught us, we have to understand individuals “not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they actually are; i.e. as they act, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will” (The German Ideology, 41). The contingent workforce, in short, as Marx has indicated, is a structural element of capitalism and, contrary to Huston and other post-al writers, is not a “new” phenomenon that requires a “revision” of the Classical Marxist theory of class and class struggle.
Neither the post-alization of lumpenproletariat nor the emergence of “managers” (as the result of such “innovations” as Taylorism, Fordism/ Postfordism), “bureaucrats,” “knowledge workers,” and “workers in the field of advertising” in any way changes the binary class structure under capitalism or points to “contradictory class locations” that require a “revision” of the class theory. (More on contradictory class locations later.) “Managers,” etc. in Taylorism or Postfordism in no sense “pose a special case” (Huston 2). They are simply class fractures—folds within the existing binary class—and not “excesses” outside the binary class structure. In short, they are not sites of slippage and sliding, nor places of difference torn between the proletariat and the bourgeois, nor are they emerging locations of post-capitalist class formations that render class struggle irrelevant. (I must add here that although Huston does not say class and class struggle are irrelevant, the way he rewrites these concepts makes them irrelevant.)
Huston’s related point is that (as the practices of labor unions indicate) there is no “necessary” relation between “class structure” (class-in-itself) and “class formation” (class-for-itself). The two, according to such theorists as Przeworski (“From Proletarian into Class” Politics and Society 7:4, 1977), are not in a relation of determination. At the core of this argument is, of course, the post-al logic of the lack of historical necessity and the conclusion that history is the unfolding not of the “laws of motion of capital” but the rule of the alea. The use of post-al logic here is aimed at postulating in a (post)structuralist fashion that there are no historically necessary relations between class structure and class formation and that there are thus more “differences” of class in the class itself and not between classes (Huston 5). In these arguments, the economic struggle is replaced by an epistemological problematization (laws of cause-effect); “class” itself is displaced by the eccentricity of “individual” behavior, and “class consciousness” (a historically determined totality) is overturned in favor of the complexity and errancy of unique personal “attitudes” that exceed their class structure.
Capitalism produces collective labor processes within which groups of laborers are exploited. The notion that Marxist class theory needs to be revised because class structure in neocapitalism does not have a necessary relation to class formation is, after all, fundamentally based on the “evidence” that individuals within these groups have different (individual) attitudes that exceed their location in the class structure. But class analysis is the analysis of group exploitation not inquiry into individual preferences and tastes. (Here the politics of Huston’s move in redefining class as a matter of status and income becomes more clear.) Huston’s view, like all idealist Weberian class analyses, substitutes “attitude” for the Marxist notion of historically determined “class consciousness” and takes personal difference as a mark of the disappearance of class consciousness. Huston’s notion of the absence of necessity is founded upon the idea of the “spontaneous” emergence of “class consciousness” in all workers simply because they have the “experience” of exploitation and oppression. The fact that a worker does not “spontaneously” (because he/she is located in class structure) develop “class consciousness” is a point emphasized by such Marxist revolutionaries as Lenin. In What is to be Done? (New York:International Publishers, 1956, 51), Lenin writes, “All those who talk about ‘overrating the importance of ideology,’ about exaggerating the role of the conscious element, etc. imagine that the labour movement pure and simple can elaborate, and will elaborate, an independent ideology for itself, if only the workers ‘wrest their fate from the hands of the leaders.’ But this is a profound mistake.” It is in this part of What is to be Done? that Lenin argues that workers take part in social change not as workers (“spontaneously” responding to their location in the class structure) but as “socialist theoreticians.” In other words, theory and not simple “experience” is the weapon of class struggle.
In a bizarre turn of argument, Huston seems to say that Trade Union conservatism—its opportunism and what Lenin called “economism” (its narrow interpretation of the economic in terms of wages, etc.)—contradicts the Marxist theory of class struggle (2). Marxism has always critiqued trade unionism as a reformist practice: a practice that attempts to modify class consciousness among the proletariat. A central segment of Lenin’s What is to be Done? is in fact devoted to such a critique.
It might be necessary here to point to another practice that Marx has thoroughly theorized as part of capitalism but that Huston regards to be a “special case” justifying his call for revisionism. Huston writes that “new” conditions in global capitalism have made the interests of the first world and the third world proletariat different, and he concludes that “There is no necessary convergence of interests between workers in ‘advanced’ industrial locals and those in ‘industrializing’ locals” (2). However, in his Letter (April 9, 1870) to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, Marx analyzed the conflicts within the international working class in terms of what Huston calls “advanced industrial” countries, exemplified by Great Britain, and the “industrializing locals,” represented by Ireland. “The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself” (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975, 222). In recognition of the role that ideology (that missing concept in Huston’s analysis) plays in mystifying the class consciousness of the workers, Marx continues: “He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the ‘poor whites’ to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.” (222).
What Huston offers with great fanfare as the most recent “radical” changes in capitalism, in other words, are structural features of the regime of capital and wage-labor and not “excess”ive new aspects that require the “revision” of classical Marxism. Even in such an early text as The German Ideology (75-80), Marx and Engels discuss the role of what Huston calls “capital mobility” and theorize the impact of this on class struggle. As distinguished from what they call “estate capital,” “movable” capital was responsible for radical shifts not only in “property relations” (class relations) within a nation but also among nations (77)—a process that created antagonism among workers of the world. The “situations where workers, and states, compete with one another in the making of concessions to capital” (Huston 2) is, thus, far from being a “new” structural feature of capitalism.
Huston’s text reaches the conclusions that it does, because in advocating the post-alizing of Classical Marxism it—like all similar post-al writing—is ahistorical. It isolates, idealizes and, consequently, mystifies as “new” the structural features of capitalism that Marx has theorized in his various writings. The ahistoricity of Huston’s post-al analysis—which demands the historicizing of Marxism—is in no way an oversight on his part: his post-al ahistoricity (like the idealism of ludic materialists who insist on bodies that “matter”) is in fact a historical one. It is by means of such post-al readings of capitalism that class is transformed from an economic category to a political one, thus replacing a historical materialist class analysis with a cultural analysis of class (as status, professional standing, income, taste…). In so doing, Huston erases “production” and in its place puts “consumption:” equality in production, in short, is displaced by freedom (which is assumed to mean “equality”) of consumption. This is the theory of class that legitimates class society and represents class as an inevitability in all forms of organizing human societies. There is, of course, no narrative more pleasureful to the ruling class and the ludic theorists who justify its economic interests in the guise of philosophy. If class is a matter of consumption—a question of culture—then it is in fact not an explanation of all other oppressions under capitalism but rather is merely one of many sites of oppression. Class, then, is no different than “lookism” or “ageism.” And what produces “lookism,” “ageism” “class-ism”? Huston’s answer is that these are “hierarchies,” that is, they are the effects of power and the exercise of AUTHORITY, as if power or authority are autonomous and not themselves effects of economic practices.
The project of anarchism is to separate “power” from the “economic” and to equate liberation with abolition of the State. As I have already suggested, opposition to the State (before the arrival of a socialist society in which economic equality is established) is simply a ruse, an alibi to remove “regulatory” practices from business enterprises and, in so doing, put in place of the (public) State the (private) Corporation. The call for abolishing “authority” is, in actuality, a call for freedom for the transnational corporation and its monadic individuals.
Let me not disappoint Huston and end (as I began) on a dogmatic note; let me, as he puts it, “rely on the AUTHORITY of some pre-existing canon.” My canonic text—which explains with great lucidity the non-canonic and the excessive—is Engels’ letter to Theodor Cuno, from London to Milan, January 24, 1872 (Selected Correspondence, 257-262). After outlining Bakunin’s theory as a confused melange of “Proudhonism and communism,” Engels describes how anarchists attempt to erase “the class antagonism between capitalists and wage workers which has arisen through social development.” In place of class antagonism, Bakunin proposes a “radical” project: the abolishing of the state. But, as Engels continues, “the state is nothing more than the organization which the ruling classes…have established in order to protect their social privileges.” If, in a more advanced stage of capitalism, these social privileges are preserved better through other means, the ruling class will attempt to abolish the state (remember the Republican Party’s platform: get government off our backs). Bakunin is the theorist of this advanced stage of capitalism, and this is why, as Engels says, Bakunin “sounds extremely radical.” His “radicalism” (that is his displacing of revolution with subversion and reform) satisfies the “desire” of the bourgeois “left,” which is “radical” only within the existing class society. This is the reason why Engels goes on to say: “Bakuninist theory has speedily found favor in Italy and Spain among young lawyers, doctors…(258). In his “reading” of Bakunin, Engels has in fact “read” the project of the post-al left and accurately described why it is saying such terrible things about Classical Marxism—which stands for overthrowing class society through revolutionary praxis.
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