{"id":598,"date":"2022-01-25T16:14:49","date_gmt":"2022-01-25T16:14:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/internationalistperspective.org\/staging\/3363\/?p=598"},"modified":"2022-01-25T16:14:49","modified_gmt":"2022-01-25T16:14:49","slug":"interpretation-or-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/internationalistperspective.org\/staging\/3363\/interpretation-or-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Interpretation or Change?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/strong>\u201cThe philosophers have only interpreted<\/em><\/strong> the world, in various ways; the point is to change<\/em><\/strong> it.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 – Marx, Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach<\/p>\n

Of late, some members of IP have shown considerable interest in some works of academic Marxists.\u00a0\u00a0 I offer here some observations on academic versus revolutionary Marxism.<\/p>\n

Not all academic Marxists are academics; Michael Heinrich, I understand, is not.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 For revolutionary Marxists this negativity is inconsistent with Marx\u2019s view that to effect revolutionary change a revolutionary subject is needed and for the creation of a communist society that subject is the proletariat.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 For revolutionary Marxists, the revolutionary subject is not a conjecture.\u00a0\u00a0 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 \u2013 particularly in view of the time elapsed since the last revolutionary wave.<\/p>\n

One of the prime stomping grounds for academic Marxists today is the first chapter of Capital, volume I.\u00a0\u00a0 Here, Marx introduces two notions \u2013 the value form and commodity fetishism \u2013 that have been seized upon by academics who punish a couple of his paragraphs almost to death.\u00a0\u00a0 Marx acknowledges the role of Aristotle as his starting point for his discussion of the value form, and he was certainly influenced by Aristotle\u2019s thinking (and aware of its shortfalls) on substance and form with regard to his exposition on value.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Although he did not name the presenter of the notion of \u2018fetish\u2019 to the European world, Charles de Brosses, he made good use of the notion.\u00a0\u00a0 De Brosses described certain West African tribes\u2019 beliefs that held that within the fetish object resided a spirit; it was not the object that possessed power but the spirit within it.\u00a0\u00a0 Marx created an ingenious metaphor \u2013 commodity fetishism – by combining these notions in the way he did:\u00a0 substance and form from Greek philosophy and a similar (though not the same) notion from the developing discipline of anthropology.\u00a0\u00a0 Within the metaphor they were linked and enabled Marx to deal with the \u2018substance\u2019 of exchange value.\u00a0\u00a0 Like all metaphors, they are not precise descriptors and neither do they tend to time-travel well.\u00a0 Nonetheless, certain academics have ignored his use of metaphor and seek to divine the mystery in Marx\u2019s words in a kind of latter-day hermeneutics.<\/p>\n

Werner Bonefeld points to different interpretations of form<\/em> in his introduction to volume I of Open Marxism<\/em>:\u00a0 form as species of something generic, and form as mode of existence.\u00a0\u00a0 In his words, \u201c[u]pon these two understandings of ‘form’ crucial theoretical and practical differences turn.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 In reading his and others works, it is not always clear which understanding is being used.\u00a0\u00a0 In Heinrich\u2019s talk on the political impact of Marx\u2019s form analysis (given at the 2021 Red May event) he must have used the term a hundred times without explaining what he meant.\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps he considered its meaning so obvious it did not need to be explained; less charitably, one might say that \u2018form\u2019 has become an elastic term that can usefully cover a range of imprecisions \u2013 offering a kind of philosophical legerdemain.<\/p>\n

Marx himself, in talking about exchange value, wrote that \u201c[it] cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the \u2018form of appearance\u2019 of a content distinguishable from it.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 The English term \u2018form of appearance\u2019 is, I feel, an over-literal translation of the German word, Erscheinungsform<\/em>, which Marx himself regarded as imprecise:\u00a0 when the word was first used in (the German edition of) Capital it had inverted commas (scary notes) round it.\u00a0\u00a0 In my view, the \u2018form and content\u2019 heritage from early European thinking has too much \u2018container and contained\u2019 about it and can lead to over-physical interpretations.\u00a0\u00a0 As if to correct this possibility, Marx goes on later to introduce the notion of the fetish.\u00a0\u00a0 He points to the \u201cdefinite social relations between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.\u00a0\u00a0 In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men\u2019s hands.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although fetish<\/em> appeared first in 18th<\/sup> 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Radical Marxist students in the 1960s brought the term back into anthropological use.\u00a0\u00a0 And today, fetishism<\/em> is spread over academic Marxist writings like a rash \u2013 although its meaning has travelled a long way from Marx\u2019s own use in his concept of \u2018commodity fetishism\u2019 a century and a half ago.\u00a0\u00a0 So, just as the meaning of fetish<\/em> spread out to mean what any anthropologist wanted it to mean the same behaviour seems to afflict today\u2019s Marxists who often apply it way beyond Marx\u2019s own usage; that\u2019s not necessarily wrong but it does have to be argued.<\/p>\n

Bonefeld\u2019s highlighting of different interpretations of the word form<\/em> should be a warning, but academic Marxists still crash through it.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s not the only term that should come with a health warning; \u2018mediation\u2019 is another.\u00a0\u00a0 For example, one philosopher, Brian O\u2019Connor (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.\u00a0\u00a0 He concludes that \u201cmediation is, in fact, an equivocal term which in both Hegel and Adorno covers a variety of entirely different conceptual relations.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0O\u2019Connor may be right or wrong about the points he makes; either way the argument for consistency is clear.\u00a0\u00a0 And the word continues to be used casually \u2013 as with its siblings, form and fetish.<\/p>\n

Why should the discussion of the commodity today have to be bound by the vocabulary and concepts of 150 years ago?\u00a0\u00a0 Today\u2019s philosophers of mind have produced frameworks within which the social use of symbols produces a multitude of what are termed social (including institutional) facts.\u00a0\u00a0 It is in this context that value is one among many \u2013 albeit that for the capitalist mode of production that symbol is of pivotal importance.\u00a0\u00a0 Yet, while the use of the concept of social facts has become widespread in many areas of research \u2013 including palaeoanthropology and cognitive archaeology \u2013 Heinrich, in his Red May hour discussing forms, uses the term \u2018social fact\u2019 only rarely, and then through gritted teeth.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0 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?\u00a0 Is there a virtue in always ploughing the same furrow?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Now, if the development of ideas is of interest, one can go through all that.\u00a0\u00a0 But the fact is that there have been processes of supersession not only in technologies but also in knowledge, ideas and methods \u2013 and we should use them.<\/p>\n

Additionally, several Marxist academics \u2013 having got to the mid-19th<\/sup> Century, stay there.\u00a0\u00a0 There is in many writings a lack of history, a timelessness in their account of what capitalist society is.\u00a0\u00a0 In many expositions, there is only the value-form of commodities \u2013 no reference to the historicity of institutions that have been built around it.\u00a0\u00a0 These institutions are national and transnational and cover military forces, economic relations between states and individual companies, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 At the money level, the development of the most extraordinary complex of financial trading mechanisms \u2013 cash, credit, currencies, derivatives, offshore jurisdictions and what-have-you.\u00a0\u00a0 But most of this is ignored; there is only the value form to be dealt with at the level of cloth and coats.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s a bit like Richard Dawkins for whom his equivalent – our genes \u2013 are housed in gigantic lumbering robots; the only robotic driver is the gene.\u00a0\u00a0 Marx was acutely aware that his economic cell-form (genes were unknown in his day) of bourgeois society – the commodity \u2013 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<\/em>, else we might fall into a Dawkins-like trap.<\/p>\n

All Marxist philosophers acknowledge that the role of the state is important, although there are different takes on this.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Neither Heinrich nor Bonefeld would agree with the concept of state capitalism, a concept central to IP\u2019s (and others\u2019) analyses of the evolution of capitalism since the onset of the 20th<\/sup> Century.<\/p>\n

It has been noted that the Frankfurt School had little interest in the world outside Europe, America and Russia \u2013 and that prejudice seems to have lingered on among today\u2019s critical theorists.\u00a0\u00a0 It leads to a deformation of a clear picture of global capitalism.\u00a0 \u00a0In particular, it weakens the perspective of a world<\/em> proletariat struggling in the context of a world capitalist system.<\/p>\n

The latter point is demonstrated by their attitude to the revolutionary subject, the force needed to destroy capitalism and create a classless society.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 For Heinrich, the revolutionary subject is a chimera.\u00a0\u00a0 He does not see anything beyond the occasional reaction of workers to their exploitation.\u00a0\u00a0 But for us, the revolutionary subject gestates inside global capitalism \u2013 though, for how long it is impossible to tell.\u00a0\u00a0 This is a dynamic and historical process, neither programmed nor mechanical, and not inevitable.\u00a0\u00a0 And possibly abortive.<\/p>\n

Finally, the absence of class lines in much of these discussions is significant.\u00a0\u00a0 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\u00a0\u00a0 Ideas without roots in our actual social life and its history remain at the level of being only interpretations.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Marlowe<\/p>\n

9 January 2022<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u201cThe philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 – Marx, Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach Of late, some members of IP have shown considerable interest in some works of academic Marxists.\u00a0\u00a0 I offer here some observations on academic versus revolutionary Marxism. Not all academic Marxists are academics; Michael … <\/p>\n

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