The problem with Marxism - and the forgotten hope

The biggest problem with Marxism is that in theorizing capitalism (on which Marx more or less did write the book), it failed to theorize the state as a distinct institution with its own “laws.” And nothing intrinsic to any form of Marxist theory recognizes a meaningful difference between having or not having the kind of liberty that has depended on constitutional government and representative democracy. Nothing in any form of Marxist theory indicates a preference for freedom of speech and the press. Nothing in any form of Marxist theory indicates a preference for legal systems that grant accused persons a right to a defense in a fully adversarial system. Thus nothing in Marxist theory could provide any kind of limit or source of resistance to the spectacular development in the 20th century of the administrative state where legislative and judicial functions tend to be progressively usurped by executive ones. Nothing in the idea of a worker’s state provides any basis of resistance to this.

These things can be added (back) in, but they derive from a different model of government. Marxism is utopian because it is assumes that government itself will be abolished through the agency of economic developments leading to an abolition of the economic scarcity that governance is instituted to manage. This in itself can only be applied to existing societies that are capital- and labor-intensive by begging the question of how those societies should be managed. If that question is posed, there will be both questions of economic justice and of both democracy and liberty. Marxism explained some things, but its success as a sociology could not justify its failure as a state religion, because there was too much that it could not explain — while pretending that it did.

Could a form of Marxism have developed that absorbed the liberal tradition? Attempts to do this were made, most notably in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. While the two dominant Cold War powers both insisted on the either/or, which ideologically founded the Cold War, of socialism or liberty, the truth is that the leadership of both movements did not want to roll back socialism and return to the social system in their countries before WW2 with its hereditary inequalities; but they did want to change the political system.

The question here is that of democratic socialism. Its possibility cannot be said to have been refuted by history, because it has hardly been tried. Admittedly, its possibility and desirability has also not been established empirically by historical experience, and it can only be said to have been proven or disproven by essentially theoretical arguments operating mainly to affirm a possibility by negation of its contrary. Hayek’s argument for liberalism and against socialism in The Road to Serfdom is of this kind, and so are Marxist arguments for socialism that operate by way of the critique of capitalism.

If the history of the future is open enough to allow for experimentation and novelty, and it surely is, then the field of the political (which, broadly, includes much of philosophy and most interesting work in the arts) is one where there is work to be done. Thatcher’s statement that “There is no alternative” (existing today) is only another way of saying that there is this need for that work on the future that comprises the critical experimentation that Michel Foucault spoke of in his belated rejoinder to Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”: “the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.” Today, this task falls mainly to people whose work has something to do with art and the art world, and it explains why that world is now so vital.

Opposed to this is every political theology (all theology is, obviously, governmental, while a modern politics that, at least since Machiavelli, ties liberty to contingency, or chance, can at least want not to be), according to which whatever happens to you must be just, since all that happens is determined and thus can be said to be necessitated, either as what an individual will deserves through its own internal causality, or what it must be resigned to, as that, perhaps external to us, of the deity. Calvin, Adam Smith, and, in some readings, Hegel, all present figures of such necessity, legitimating the governmentality of markets and bureaucracies, which in the 20th century were often conceived as opposite and alternative paths. But as Giorgio Agamben (in his account of the history of ‘economy’ and governmentality in terms of theological figures) and others have shown, they are forms of the same.

Could it be, as Hegel thought, that the realization in society and history of reason and that of liberty are part of a single logic, but on a path not yet taken? This would, to be sure, be something more than the empty invocations, in the face of figurations of social totality, of possibility as such in an undetermined and open future, which may be not so different from invoking practice to implement the truths of theory, since implementation is to tasks what enforcement is to persons.

In the meantime, as we seem to be stuck for now with business (work to be done) and its management or governance, the figure of the political as limiting the inevitable power of actors and systems that associates domination and exploitation with the ubiquity of original sin, what I am calling the liberal model (that of liberty), which some Americans who claim the title call conservative, may be the only game in town. It is not one that must exclude social democratic policies, but it is one that will remain skeptical of all forms of social authority, in a skepticism that is not at all the same as totalizing refusal. The totalizing refusal of domination of some forms of anarchist (or ‘small c’ communist) political desire is as beholden to the figure of totality as their unlimited endorsement. The latter being that of a Hobbesian theory of government or perhaps the stale and simplified Hegelianism of those Marxists (Marxist-Leninism inherited this from Engels and the Second International) who affirm a deified abstract ‘history’ on the developmentally ‘progressive’ model of historical temporality that they shared with the contemporary colonialism, not to mention the biologized nationalism of social Darwinism, whose results remain in memory with such infamy.

The absence of an alternative to the liberal model would mean practically that we name those evils we must oppose today in order to combat them with or without angels whose message is the institution of happiness itself. We can have faith in the coming of the messianic while fighting instances of barbarism all the same, and doing so whether rich or poor in our sometimes enabling theoretical baggage.