Interpretation or Change?

 “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”   – Marx, Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach

Of late, some members of IP have shown considerable interest in some works of academic Marxists.   I offer here some observations on academic versus revolutionary Marxism.

Not all academic Marxists are academics; Michael Heinrich, I understand, is not.   But he is certainly an academic Marxist, unmotivated by the need to change the world; this he declares bluntly since, for him, the revolutionary subject is a chimera.   For revolutionary Marxists this negativity is inconsistent with Marx’s view that to effect revolutionary change a revolutionary subject is needed and for the creation of a communist society that subject is the proletariat.   For Marx, the proletariat as revolutionary subject was an insight; for us, there is historical evidence of its actuality and potential as shown in the 1870 Paris Commune, in 1905 in Russia, in the 1917-1923 revolutionary wave that was expressed across the capitalist world.   For revolutionary Marxists, the revolutionary subject is not a conjecture.   Which does not make it easy to describe the link between the social movements of today and the appearance of the global social force of the proletariat tomorrow – particularly in view of the time elapsed since the last revolutionary wave.

One of the prime stomping grounds for academic Marxists today is the first chapter of Capital, volume I.   Here, Marx introduces two notions – the value form and commodity fetishism – that have been seized upon by academics who punish a couple of his paragraphs almost to death.   Marx acknowledges the role of Aristotle as his starting point for his discussion of the value form, and he was certainly influenced by Aristotle’s thinking (and aware of its shortfalls) on substance and form with regard to his exposition on value.   Marx would also have been familiar with the use of substantial forms by the Scholastics as well as its demise in the face of the development of scientific thought in the European early modern period.   Although he did not name the presenter of the notion of ‘fetish’ to the European world, Charles de Brosses, he made good use of the notion.   De Brosses described certain West African tribes’ beliefs that held that within the fetish object resided a spirit; it was not the object that possessed power but the spirit within it.   Marx created an ingenious metaphor – commodity fetishism – by combining these notions in the way he did:  substance and form from Greek philosophy and a similar (though not the same) notion from the developing discipline of anthropology.   Within the metaphor they were linked and enabled Marx to deal with the ‘substance’ of exchange value.   Like all metaphors, they are not precise descriptors and neither do they tend to time-travel well.  Nonetheless, certain academics have ignored his use of metaphor and seek to divine the mystery in Marx’s words in a kind of latter-day hermeneutics.

Werner Bonefeld points to different interpretations of form in his introduction to volume I of Open Marxism:  form as species of something generic, and form as mode of existence.   In his words, “[u]pon these two understandings of ‘form’ crucial theoretical and practical differences turn.”   In reading his and others works, it is not always clear which understanding is being used.   In Heinrich’s talk on the political impact of Marx’s form analysis (given at the 2021 Red May event) he must have used the term a hundred times without explaining what he meant.   Perhaps he considered its meaning so obvious it did not need to be explained; less charitably, one might say that ‘form’ has become an elastic term that can usefully cover a range of imprecisions – offering a kind of philosophical legerdemain.

Marx himself, in talking about exchange value, wrote that “[it] cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the ‘form of appearance’ of a content distinguishable from it.”   The English term ‘form of appearance’ is, I feel, an over-literal translation of the German word, Erscheinungsform, which Marx himself regarded as imprecise:  when the word was first used in (the German edition of) Capital it had inverted commas (scary notes) round it.   In my view, the ‘form and content’ heritage from early European thinking has too much ‘container and contained’ about it and can lead to over-physical interpretations.   As if to correct this possibility, Marx goes on later to introduce the notion of the fetish.   He points to the “definite social relations between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.   In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion.   There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race.   So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands.   I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.”

Although fetish appeared first in 18^th Century anthropology writings, over time its meaning was corrupted and as it grew more sexual connotations (post-Freud) the term became an embarrassment to anthropology and its use almost disappeared from academic writings.   Radical Marxist students in the 1960s brought the term back into anthropological use.   And today, fetishism is spread over academic Marxist writings like a rash – although its meaning has travelled a long way from Marx’s own use in his concept of ‘commodity fetishism’ a century and a half ago.   So, just as the meaning of fetish spread out to mean what any anthropologist wanted it to mean the same behaviour seems to afflict today’s Marxists who often apply it way beyond Marx’s own usage; that’s not necessarily wrong but it does have to be argued.

Bonefeld’s highlighting of different interpretations of the word form should be a warning, but academic Marxists still crash through it.   It’s not the only term that should come with a health warning; ‘mediation’ is another.   For example, one philosopher, Brian O’Connor (in Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, No. 20 (1-2), (1999) (pp. 84-96)) describes the concept of mediation in Hegel and Adorno; he finds four different versions of the concept in Hegel and two in Adorno.   He concludes that “mediation is, in fact, an equivocal term which in both Hegel and Adorno covers a variety of entirely different conceptual relations.”     O’Connor may be right or wrong about the points he makes; either way the argument for consistency is clear.   And the word continues to be used casually – as with its siblings, form and fetish.

Why should the discussion of the commodity today have to be bound by the vocabulary and concepts of 150 years ago?   Today’s philosophers of mind have produced frameworks within which the social use of symbols produces a multitude of what are termed social (including institutional) facts.   It is in this context that value is one among many – albeit that for the capitalist mode of production that symbol is of pivotal importance.   Yet, while the use of the concept of social facts has become widespread in many areas of research – including palaeoanthropology and cognitive archaeology – Heinrich, in his Red May hour discussing forms, uses the term ‘social fact’ only rarely, and then through gritted teeth.   It seems to me, that much of the philosophically-generated opacity around discussion of the commodity could be made more transparent using current concepts and terminology.

To understand the chemical process of combustion we do not today begin from the theory of phlogiston; although very interesting from the point of view of the history of scientific thought, it does not help us understand the process of combustion.   So, why should we have to go back to Aristotle, the Scholastics, Hegel and whoever before coming forward to deal with the commodity in the capitalist mode of production?  Is there a virtue in always ploughing the same furrow?    Now, if the development of ideas is of interest, one can go through all that.   But the fact is that there have been processes of supersession not only in technologies but also in knowledge, ideas and methods – and we should use them.

Additionally, several Marxist academics – having got to the mid-19^th Century, stay there.   There is in many writings a lack of history, a timelessness in their account of what capitalist society is.   In many expositions, there is only the value-form of commodities – no reference to the historicity of institutions that have been built around it.   These institutions are national and transnational and cover military forces, economic relations between states and individual companies, etc.   At the money level, the development of the most extraordinary complex of financial trading mechanisms – cash, credit, currencies, derivatives, offshore jurisdictions and what-have-you.   But most of this is ignored; there is only the value form to be dealt with at the level of cloth and coats.   It’s a bit like Richard Dawkins for whom his equivalent – our genes – are housed in gigantic lumbering robots; the only robotic driver is the gene.   Marx was acutely aware that his economic cell-form (genes were unknown in his day) of bourgeois society – the commodity – was housed inside a myriad of social relationships that have history and that they have consequences; to find this, we have to read his many works outside of Capital, else we might fall into a Dawkins-like trap.

All Marxist philosophers acknowledge that the role of the state is important, although there are different takes on this.   For Heinrich, the state is neutral but because the bourgeoisie has the greatest power in society it follows it has the greatest power to affect the policies of the state.   For Bonefeld, the state is neither neutral nor independent; the political state is a class state without being the direct instrument of a class; for him, the state is a field for struggle and reform where the struggle civilizes the conduct of government.   Neither Heinrich nor Bonefeld would agree with the concept of state capitalism, a concept central to IP’s (and others’) analyses of the evolution of capitalism since the onset of the 20^th Century.

It has been noted that the Frankfurt School had little interest in the world outside Europe, America and Russia – and that prejudice seems to have lingered on among today’s critical theorists.   It leads to a deformation of a clear picture of global capitalism.   In particular, it weakens the perspective of a world proletariat struggling in the context of a world capitalist system.

The latter point is demonstrated by their attitude to the revolutionary subject, the force needed to destroy capitalism and create a classless society.   For Bonefeld, there is little illumination because, for him, the struggle civilises the conduct of government; illusion about the state is the only alternative to the misery of our time.   For Heinrich, the revolutionary subject is a chimera.   He does not see anything beyond the occasional reaction of workers to their exploitation.   But for us, the revolutionary subject gestates inside global capitalism – though, for how long it is impossible to tell.   This is a dynamic and historical process, neither programmed nor mechanical, and not inevitable.   And possibly abortive.

Finally, the absence of class lines in much of these discussions is significant.   All ideas, from left communist to left social democrat to Leninist are considered to contribute equally valid subject matter for academic discourse; there may be skin in the academic game but there is no stake in the real world   Ideas without roots in our actual social life and its history remain at the level of being only interpretations.   For, unless these ideas are animated by explicit links to the interests of the struggle of the working class, they will at best be left as vapourware in the realm of ideas or, at worst, be co-opted to serve the capitalist state whose interests are directly opposed to those of the revolutionary subject.

Marlowe

9 January 2022