Читать книгу The Retreat from Class - Ellen Meiksins Wood - Страница 8

An author is bound to look back with a certain unease at a book published more than a decade ago, especially a book written at a particular political conjuncture and in response to a very specific and short-lived intellectual current. There are the inevitable regrets about this or that formulation or judgment. Some personalities and ideas that seemed important then are likely to have virtually disappeared. And the sense of distance will seem even greater when the intervening years have seen a major historical rupture – in this case, one of the greatest epochal shifts in modern times: the collapse of Communism.

The Retreat from Class belongs to its time. Yet I think it had, and still has, something to say beyond its critical commentary on a now defunct intellectual tendency. It was certainly intended as a theoretical reflection on larger questions which are at least as current today as they were then – questions to do with class, ideology and politics, socialism and democracy. But I also like to think that even as intellectual history its significance has outlived its subject. Post-Marxism may be yesterday’s news, but its progeny is very much alive in today’s intellectual fashions – and I think the book can claim the virtue of having, on the whole, seen where things were going.

On the face of it, a lot has changed in the intellectual life of the left since 1986, and in the wake of 1989. For instance, when The Retreat from Class was first published, the term ‘post-Marxism’ was still just establishing itself. These days it hardly means anything any more. Those who might once have described themselves in these terms would probably disavow that self-description now, at least in its original meaning. After all, when the phrase was coined, it was meant to convey that, while its exponents felt they had moved well beyond Marxism, they still acknowledged their roots in, and their debt to, that tradition. Today, their connections with Marxism are very distant and tenuous, almost invisible. People have, in their various ways, moved on, in directions that have very little to do with Marxism, or even socialism, except to repudiate it. It seems clear that post-Marxism was just a short pit-stop on the way to anti-Marxism.

Still, it would be a mistake to attribute this trajectory solely, or even primarily, to the dramatic events of the late 1980s. For that matter, it would be a mistake to exaggerate the changes in the intellectual and political configuration of the post-Marxist left ‘after the fall’. There is an unbroken continuity between early post-Marxism and today’s postmodernism – with, among other things, their common emphasis on ‘discourse’ and ‘difference’, or on the fragmentary nature of reality and human identity. Those continuities are, if anything, more remarkable than the changes, and their roots can be traced even further back, to the 1950s and 60s, to the formative years of the post-Marxist luminaries.

To put those continuities in perspective, let us first consider the changes. One of the constitutive contradictions of post-Marxism was that even those who insisted most emphatically on ‘difference’, and who most forcefully repudiated ‘essentialism’, ‘universalism’ and class politics, still professed a commitment to certain inclusive and embarrassingly ‘universalistic’ political objectives, including socialism. In the presence of so much ‘difference’, and in the absence of a unifying social base like class, these universalistic objectives compelled post-Marxists to rely on very general and socially indeterminate political principles. In particular, the post-Marxist concept of ‘radical democracy’, which was meant to replace or subsume the traditional socialist project, had to be defined in terms vague enough to serve as a kind of lowest common denominator among irreducibly ‘different’ emancipatory projects with no significant common foundation.

The ‘democracy’ in ‘radical democracy’ was, in any case, always deeply ambiguous. At its worst, and in default of a social foundation, the post-Marxist doctrine of ‘radical democracy’ assigned an inordinately large political role to intellectuals and their ‘discursive practices’, with positively anti-democratic implications. The real democratic struggles to which post-Marxism professed to be committed – struggles, for instance, against racial or sexual oppression – tended to be overshadowed by the academic politics of discourse analysis. At its best, the social indeterminacy of ‘radical democracy’ made it politically vacuous. For all its anti-universalism, this post-Marxist concept turned out to be – could only be – far more abstractly universalistic, and far less sensitive to social and historical specificity, than the ‘essentialist’ Marxist conception of socialism it was meant to replace.

Here, if anywhere, postmodernism represents a shift. Postmodernists, to the extent that they remain committed to egalitarian goals or to some kind of social justice, have not entirely escaped this contradiction between emancipatory aspirations and the repudiation of any moral or political foundation to support them. But, on the whole, postmodernism has more or less decisively resolved that contradiction in favour of fragmentation and difference. There is here no lingering attachment to any kind of ‘universalism’, ‘foundationalism’, ‘rationalism’, or the ‘Enlightenment project’. The end result has been not only to repudiate socialism or any other ‘universalistic’ politics, but effectively to deny the very possibility of political action altogether. Postmodernism cannot offer a plausible ground for its own emancipatory commitments or, for that matter, its own radical pluralism. In fact, it is hard to see how even a political principle as vague as the post-Marxist version of ‘radical democracy’ could survive the postmodernist destruction of all political foundations.

But, again, despite these ostensible shifts, and despite the intervening historical ruptures, the intellectual continuities between post-Marxism before the fall and today’s intellectual fashions are more striking than the changes. In some important respects, the collapse of Communism only accelerated intellectual processes that were already at work in the 1960s.

The militant sixties belonged mainly to a generation that had come to political and intellectual maturity in the midst of the long post-war boom. (I am here summarizing an argument I make at greater length in ‘A Chronology of the New Left and Its Successors, or: Who’s Old-Fashioned Now?’, Socialist Register, 1995.) Their relationship to capitalism was therefore rather more ambiguous than that of their immediate predecessors, the first generation of the ‘New Left’ whose formative experiences had been depression and war. The younger New Left, raised in the ‘Golden Age’ of capitalism and with a very different perception of capitalist normality, was at once deeply opposed to the ‘system’ and deeply preoccupied with its apparent success. There was, of course, a wide range of responses to this new reality; but among the ideas that most deeply penetrated important sections of the student movement (under the influence of thinkers like Herbert Marcuse) was that the hegemonic grip of consumer capitalism, especially its grip on the working class, had permanently neutralized the old oppositional agencies. This apparently left the field to more liberated intellectuals.

The outbreaks of working-class militancy in the late sixties and early seventies in various countries might have shaken that conviction, and they certainly provided ample testimony to the contradictions of the ‘Golden Age’. Yet many student radicals (and the mature academics they were to become) remained committed to one persistent idea: that students and their intellectual mentors would have to fill a historical vacuum left by the labour movement, and that class struggle in the traditional sense could be replaced by ‘ideological class struggle’ or the transmutation of theory into a ‘material force’.

With certain adjustments – above all, the disappearance of ‘class’ from ‘class struggle’ – an unbroken thread, from ‘ideological class struggle’ to the academic politics of ‘discourse’, connects some strands of 1960s student radicalism with today’s intellectual fashions (and even some varieties of Western student Maoism with today’s academic postmodernism: from ‘cultural revolution’ to textual deconstruction). The main transit point along the evolutionary line from one to the other was post-Marxism and its affiliated tendencies.

Whatever oppositional vigour the post-Marxist theorists of the 1980s had retained from their sixties youth is today all but gone. In the new post-left theories, there is no alternative to capitalism, and there is even less room for class politics than there was in post-Marxism. So there is a deep historical paradox here: an intellectual trend that began with a strong oppositional impulse in the ‘Golden Age’ of capitalism has come to fruition as a surrender to capitalism, at a moment when the system’s flaws and contradictions are more visible than at any other time since the Great Depression. What is more, there are signs that a new era of class politics is beginning, as the labour movement in various countries shows signs of renewal and people take to the streets in opposition to neo-liberalism and ‘globalization’. Nothing in the current fashions on the left has prepared them for this.

It is too soon to tell what effect these historical developments will have on today’s intellectual fashions. But recent eruptions of class struggle (together with the less attractive manifestations of ‘difference’ and ‘identity politics’ in Yugoslavia and elsewhere, or the increasingly obvious ways in which racial and sexual oppression are affected by material conditions and class) may help to account for a certain defensiveness that has recently crept into postmodernist discourse. Some of the most fashionable figures in today’s academic pantheon – Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, Richard Rorty, Judith Butler, for instance – are showing signs of chafing against the theoretical and political constraints imposed by anti-universalist, anti-class, and anti-Marxist dogmas.

We might think that this is the moment for new and creative initiatives in Marxist theory and practice. Why then return to the debates surrounding a dead and more or less forgotten post-Marxism? One answer is that it may be helpful to trace the present impasse in post-left political thinking back to that critical turning point. At least then the debate was still about class politics, before the turn that took class out of our line of vision altogether, along with socialism and even the critique of capitalism. If there is some urgency now to renew our resources for thinking about class and class politics, maybe that turning point is not such a bad place to start.

Ellen Meiksins Wood

Spring 1998