Marx and other Four-Letter Words

by Georgina Blakeley (Editor), Valerie Bryson (Editor)

Overview

Karl Marx's classic definitions of class and society under capitalism are still widely used today. Ideas such as class, revolution, production and oppression are employed across a broad range of academic subjects, reaching beyond politics, economics and sociology. Yet these concepts, within a specifically Marxist framework, are not always easy to understand. This book is an ideal student introduction that explains, in clear and concise chapters, the precise meaning and implications of each of Marx's key concepts. Furthermore, the contributors show how these ideas continue to be relevant, and how they relate to modern society. The contributors include leading academics in the field of politicial science. Outlining clearly what each concept means, they move on to situate it within cutting-edge contemporary political theory. Concepts include historical materialism, capitalism, class, the state, imperialism, the division of labour, oppression, production and reproduction, revolution, working class internationalism, equality and democracy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745322520
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	05/25/2005
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Georgina Blakeley is Head of Politics at the University of Huddersfield. She has written prominently on Spanish politics and democratisation, in addition to Marxism. She is the co-editor of Marx and Other Four-Letter Words (Pluto, 2005) and Contemporary Political Concepts (Pluto, 2002).

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Historical Materialism

Philip Wood

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the role of historical materialism in social explanation. The first part discusses two ways of interpreting Marx's methodological writings. Orthodox historical materialism largely ignores the ambiguities in Marx's writings in order to build an abstract theory of history useful in the defence of 'actually existing socialism'. Recent changes, however, have magnified the importance of race, gender, nationalism, the environment and other factors alien to the orthodoxy, and a second, revisionist, interpretation has emerged, suggesting a non-deterministic empirical Marxism. The second half of the chapter assesses the merits of these two approaches in terms of their ability to explain one of the most significant tendencies in contemporary American politics: the expansion and racialisation of prisons.

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM: TRADITIONAL AND MODERN

Despite its importance, Karl Marx nowhere provided a systematic treatment of his general methodological position. The term 'historical materialism' comes to us from Engels, who systematised Marx's ideas in the decades around his friend's death. The problem that Engels faced was that Marx's methodological writings are both ambitious and ambiguous. For one thing, they are scattered through writings whose purposes are historically specific, spanning a long period of large-scale political and intellectual change. For another, the task Marx set himself – to understand social and economic development; to explain historical events and long-term structural change; to combine English and Scottish political economy, French materialism and German idealism; and to unify science with political practice – is so grand that analytical rigour seems an unlikely outcome.

Attempts to encapsulate historical materialism in a clear and concise set of methodological statements inevitably founder on these shoals. The most famous of these attempts belongs to Engels, who wrote in 1892 that historical materialism:

designate[s] that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another. (Marx and Engels 1968:382–3)

The ambiguities that result are easy to find. How do economic development, changes in modes of production and exchange, class divisions and class struggles combine to explain historical social change? What weight is to be attached to each? Does the word 'consequent' imply that class divisions and struggles simply reflect the level of economic development and changes in the modes of production and exchange? What is meant by the terms 'ultimate cause' and 'great moving power', and do they imply economic determinism? Does the materialist cast of the summary imply no part in the explanation of historical social change for individuals, ideas, politics and the state? Is the statement to be taken as one of logic and philosophy or as a more open-ended suggestion about the direction of concrete historical research?

Engels' statement, in other words, contains in summary form the same kinds of ambiguity that are found in Marx's work as a whole. For instance, in a preface to the first volume of Capital, Marx states that he has inverted Hegel's argument that social reality reflects the realm of ideas, implying in the process, however, that he accepts his predecessor's philosophical approach to history (1976:103). Elsewhere, however, he stresses the need for concrete historical analysis and suggests that trans-historical or philosophical abstractions are of limited value. With respect to the role of ideas, the Marx of The German Ideology argues that consciousness is a reflection of material life, while in the Theses on Feuerbach the argument is amended to allow 'sensuous' and 'practical-critical' activity to play a role in building material reality (Marx and Engels 1976:36–7, 5). Similarly, Marx's theory of socio-historical change in the Preface is a scientifically-knowable theory of the interplay of forces (technology, scientific knowledge, skills and so on) and relations of production (master–slave, lord–serf, capitalist–wage worker), in which human agency plays no part. In contrast, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx gives class struggles and subjectivity priority, so that history can be modified by conscious human action, and outcomes are uncertain (Marx and Engels 1968:180–4, 35–63). How should we deal with these ambiguities?

Orthodox historical materialism

The traditional response, referred to by Larrain as 'orthodox historical materialism', has been to stress the universal, the structural and the philosophical at the expense of the conjunctural, the social and the practical (1986: Chapter 2). The origins of this are disputed. Colletti (1972) argues that they can be traced back to Engels' letters on historical materialism after the death of Marx. In these letters, Colletti argues, Engels' defence of historical materialism stressed the reciprocal role of ideas and politics, the interplay of individual wills and the state's relative autonomy. But he also insisted that the economic was the determining factor 'in the last instance', suggesting an abstract distinction between economic and non-economic relations. In addition, the first post-Marx generation of Marxists, such as Kautsky and Plekhanov, had their own axes to grind. They 'were concerned in different ways to systematise historical materialism as a comprehensive theory of history, capable of replacing rival bourgeois disciplines and providing the workers' movement with a broad and coherent vision of the future that could be easily grasped by its militants' (Anderson 1976:6). For Colletti, Engels' letters were thus an invitation to stress the economic while largely ignoring all the other, non-economic, factors, and inaugurated a view of historical materialism as a grand materialist philosophy, divorced from its critical historical origins and universally applicable. For Larrain, historical materialism was thus transformed into a 'theory which is derived from supposedly universal laws of dialectics inherent in nature, which conceives of consciousness as a mere reflection of material life, which propounds a kind of technological determinism, and which results in a general, teleological and unilinear theory of history which sketches the necessary path of development of all nations' (1986:59). This became the orthodoxy of the Second International, was transformed into the philosophy of dialectical materialism during the Stalinist period, and was given new life in the second half of the last century by the structuralism of Althusser and Balibar (1970) and the analytic Marxian philosophy of Cohen (1978).

Predictably, this approach was of limited value in understanding capitalism or the societies in which it had emerged. Sayer agrees that the source is to be found in Engels' letters, but argues that they have been misread. The crucial point, often ignored, is that the letters 'repeatedly, and emphatically, underline the limitations of any general theory or model when it comes to analysing particular historical events, processes or societies' (Sayer 1987:10). In his letter to Bloch, Engels accepts that he and Marx are at fault for emphasising the material in their debates with idealism, 'but when it came to presenting an era of history, i.e. to making a particular application, it was a different matter and there no error could be permitted'. Again, in a letter to Schmidt: 'our conception of history is above all a guide to study, rather than a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelian' (Marx and Engels 1968:683, 679).

For Sayer, the letters are less an invitation to economic determinism than 'a general warning against a certain pre-emptive use of theory, and a plea for empirical, and in particular for historical study' (1987:11). It is no accident, he argues, that Engels refers his readers to Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire as a classic example of historical materialism in action. This is not inconsistent with Marx himself, who presents the 1859 preface, taken by many as the definitive text, as 'a few brief indications concerning the course of my politico-economic studies' and 'a guiding thread for my studies', not a fully elaborated theory of history (Marx and Engels 1968:180–1). Years earlier, in The German Ideology, Marx argued that '[e]mpirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production' (Marx and Engels 1976:35). And years later, his work on Russia led him to consider the possibility of different evolutionary paths. In a letter to Mikhailovsky, Marx rejected abstract historicism: 'one will never arrive [at a proper historical understanding] by using as one's master-key a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical' (McLellan 1977:571–2).

Revisionist historical materialism

The key turning point in the history of Marxism, according to Anderson, occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. Relative economic decline, racial upheavals, the women's, peace and environmental movements, and the 1968 events in France and Prague left orthodox Marxism ill-equipped and unable to respond, 'clearing the way for another sort of Marxism to emerge'. In this context, there developed a 'sudden zest, a new appetite, for the concrete' which revived political economy, especially in Britain and America (1983:18, 21).

This attempt to concretise historical materialism is best exemplified in the work of Larrain (1986) and Sayer (1987). Both use Cohen's interpretation of the 1859 preface as a technological theory of history as a model of orthodox historical materialism. Cohen's argument rests on a radical distinction between productive forces, which he says are material things used in the productive process, and productive relations, which involve the exercise of power and control. These, in turn, are distinguished from the superstructure, which is an ensemble of legal and institutional relations. The productive forces, defined as technologies, have causal primacy, functionally determining the rise and fall of production relations. The production relations that emerge in a given epoch do so because they enhance the development of the productive forces. In turn, the legal and institutional superstructure arises to reinforce the system of forces and relations. Both the social relations of production and the superstructure, in this image, are ultimately dependent on the way in which technological development unfolds.

Whatever the merits of Cohen's work in terms of clarity and analytical rigour, Larrain and Sayer argue that it is inadequate as a method of political economy. Precisely delimited definitions and finite, one-way causal sequences abstract from a complex and evolving reality which contextualises concepts in relational and historical settings. An assembly line is a productive force, but it also materialises the ideas of F.W. Taylor (the father of scientific management in America), and the class struggles and intellectual milieu in which he worked. Forms of cooperation and scientific knowledge of various kinds can, in other words, be productive forces (Marx 1973:706; Larrain 1986:78–80; Sayer 1987:26). The list of nonmaterial productive forces discussed by Marx is a long one, as Sayer indicates (1987:29).

A similar logic holds for productive relations. Cohen's power-based definition neglects the broader issue of the phenomena – laws, the state, ideas, culture, morality and so on – that shape them. For Marx, the economic structure was a much broader totality of social relations than the orthodoxy suggests, and his writings are full of references to non-economic relations that constitute the social relations of production (see, for instance Marx 1973:471–514).

Sayer concludes that there is 'no good reason for excluding any kind of social relation from being a possible relation of production, or for arbitrarily assigning some social relations to the "base" and others to the "superstructure" of society a priori' (1987:75). This opens up new lines of thinking, and facilitates the integration of research from intellectual traditions usually thought external to Marxism. Sayer discusses human reproduction here, but the point could equally be extended to race, ethnicity, and other factors.

There are also implications for the analysis of superstructures. Cohen's view restricts the category to non-economic institutions. Marx used the term broadly however, to encompass ideas and forms of consciousness as well as their institutionalisation in the state, religion, culture and the law. Marx's arguments about the superstructure are similar to his view of ideas generally: he denies both the validity of the distinction between the ideal and the material, and the cause–effect image of their relationship. Material reality and superstructural relations are not distinct entities connected in a causal sequence, but rather two sides of the same coin. The components of the superstructure are ideological forms of appearance of social relations. These 'phantoms' have 'the semblance of independence', but this is illusory. Consciousness 'can never be anything else than conscious existence' (Marx and Engels 1976:47). Likewise 'all struggles within the State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc., are merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out among one another'. Nevertheless, they are 'empirically verifiable and bound to material premises' (Marx and Engels 1976:54, 47). These material premises, in turn, must be grasped 'in definite historical form ... If material production itself is not conceived in its specific historical form, it is impossible to understand what is specific in the spiritual production corresponding to it and the reciprocal influence of one on the other. Otherwise one cannot get beyond inanities' (Marx 1963:285).

The formation of superstructures connects ideas and institutions with the production and reproduction of material and social life through human thought and practice. Cultural and institutional relations are products of 'a process of continuous reanimation of ideas in the context of new practices' (Larrain 1986:71). Ideas and institutional activity may be anticipatory or reflective, or they may be survivals from the past that have adapted to new conditions. They have their own life histories, produced in relationship with human practice. The cultural and institutional legacies of the past are powerful building blocks of the present, creating a stock of ideas and practices that can be drawn upon for use in political and other battles.

The result of this turn to the concrete is an image of historical materialism that is different from the orthodoxy. In place of a universal causal chain of technological forces, economic relations and superstructures, we now confront a more complicated and historically variable set of relational possibilities. Any significant relation between classes may be a production relation, with a part to play in the development of the productive forces. In place of abstract causal links that operate outside the historical process, we confront 'a rich totality of many determinations and relations' (Marx 1973:100) with structured agency and indeterminacy at its core. Production is a social process, in the broadest sense of the word.

This in turn alters the way we explain historical phenomena. The 'turn to the concrete' privileges conditional human agency rather than abstract economic forces. Since material forces are not ultimately determining, history does not guarantee that crises will be resolved through the movement to a higher level of technological development, either within capitalism, or by means of its supersession. Capitalist crises are typically crises of both the economic and the political order, and give rise to competing efforts at resolution (Hall 1978). Empirically, a shift to a higher level of technological development is only one possible outcome and if it is blocked, 'morbid symptoms' (Gramsci 1971:226) can appear, usually in the form of the resurrection of old ideas and practices long thought extinct.

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND THE PRISON GHETTO

The goal of the 'turn to the concrete' was to reconstruct historical materialism as an empirical 'guiding thread'. This section uses one of the morbid symptoms of the post-1970s crisis, the expansion and racialisation of the American prison system, as a way to assess the relative merits of the orthodox and revisionist approaches.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction - Georgina Blakeley and Valerie Bryson 1. Historical Materialism - Philip Wood 2. Capitalism - Keith Faulks 3. Class - Peter McLaverty 4. The State - Andrew Taylor 5. Imperialism - Graham Harrison 6. The Division of Labour - Renzo Llorente 7. Oppression - Mary Davis 8. Production and Reproduction - Valerie Bryson 9. Revolution - Paul Blackledge 10. Working Class Internationalism - Mark O'Brien 11. Equality - Brendan Evans 12. Democracy - Georgina Blakeley Notes on Contributors Index