Marx- A Complete Introduction

by Gill Hands

  It is not possible to detail all the conflicting theories that surround postmodernism in this chapter, but I have summarized some of the main theories of the philosophers that are relevant to the way Marx and Marxism are perceived in the postmodern world:

  Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was a French literary critic and philosopher. His writings are notoriously difficult to understand and he is best known for his development of the idea of deconstruction: a blend of philosophy, linguistics and literary analysis. This questions the true meaning of texts and shows their inherent instability. He believed that language was a slippery and suspect medium that could never represent the ‘truth’ and that there is no form of truth in any kind of academic analysis, whether economic, political or philosophical. All interpretations and narratives have equal validity. In his book Spectres of Marx, published in 1994, he put forward the idea that Marx’s ideas should be looked at as a moral system and not a scientific one.

  Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was a French cultural theorist and philosopher. His early works were greatly influenced by Marx and were an extension of some of the basic Marxist theories. He agreed that the expansion of capitalism had brought about social change, but he believed that Marx had to be brought up to date to take into account the way consumer society was changing. He believed the world is now a society of reproduction rather than production. This means that images and information are just as important to the economy as commodities; they have actually become commodities. Like Gramsci, he believed that the cultural superstructure has a power of its own and is not just a reflection of what happens in the economic base. He also believed that Marx’s theories of the modes and relations of production do not take into account the rise of modern consumerism.

  Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98) was a French philosopher and literary theorist who wrote The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge in 1979. In this he puts forward the idea that in the postmodern world nobody believes in grand narratives, or meta-narratives as they are sometimes known. Examples of grand narratives include large-scale theories or world philosophies, the view of history as a coherent progression, or the idea that science can know everything or can formulate a grand unified theory of everything. Marx’s historical materialism and economic determinism are grand narratives and so, using Lyotard’s perception of the postmodern world, people are less inclined to believe in Marx’s philosophy and follow his ideas.

  Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and Félix Guattari (1930–92) wrote a book in 1972, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in which they argued that capitalism represses individuals and gives them false ‘mediated’ desires which are connected to the production and consumption of goods; this is an extension of the beliefs of the Frankfurt School. Although they were Marxists, their views differed from the classical Marxist view, as they saw class as something of a myth, believing the working class to be a diverse mix of different types of people. They did not believe in a uniform working class that would join together to bring about revolution and saw the classical Marxist view of class as false view. They believed that under classical Marxism women and ethnic minorities were often marginalized, and in their view class struggle is only one strand of a very complex social structure and not the basis of it. The Frankfurt School thinkers saw the state as a single monolithic entity and believed society had become a homogenous mass of passive consumers. Deleuze and Guattari disagreed with this point of view; for them, society was a diverse mixture of complex individuals and they saw that capitalism was becoming unstable because of its diversity. Their view of the self is a very postmodern one, in that they believe that it is not necessary to be stuck with a single identity or fixed self: people have the choice of living out different ‘lives’ and reinventing themselves; they do not have to follow the social ‘rules.’

  Francis Fukuyama (1952–) is an American political scientist who put forward the idea that we have reached the ‘end of history’ in his book, The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992. In this he proposed that liberal democracy, as practised in the USA and Britain, was the ultimate form of society, which in some ways seems very similar to the way that Hegel saw Prussian society in the nineteenth century. Fukuyama does not see our society as the final product of the ‘universal mind’; he argued that Western civilization, based on liberal democratic values, fulfils humankind’s needs in economic terms and satisfies our needs for self-esteem and recognition, that we are becoming ‘actualized’. As we saw in Chapter 5, ‘actualization’ is often used as a term to indicate the opposite of alienation; so in Fukuyama’s view, living in modern Western society is not the alienating experience that Marx believed it to be. At the core of Fukuyama’s theory is his belief that human nature is governed by a desire for recognition. He believed that there was no need for ideological struggle after the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War. However, he has since written that scientific and technological changes may lead to developments in history, so it is not at an end after all. Critics of his theory would point out that although the Cold War has ended, there is no end to conflict between ideologies. At present, there are numerous ongoing ideological clashes, including those between religious groups: Islamic, Jewish and Christian. These have been inflamed by terrorist acts and ideological conflict doesn’t look like going away at present.

  POST-MARXISM

  Post-Marxism is a term used to describe those who have built theories on those of Marx but have gone further, so that they are outside or beyond what was considered to be Marxist thought. Post-Marxists have moved away from the economic determinism that is implicit in Marx’s work and disagree with his concept of class, but they do believe that there should be solidarity between members of society. Ernesto Laclau (1935–2014) and Chantal Mouffe (1943–) became the best known of the post-Marxists after publication of their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics in 1985. In this they analysed classical Marxism but from a postmodern perspective, drawing on theories of language and deconstruction from Derrida and also exploring Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. They believe that social conflicts arise out of ‘antagonisms’ within the hegemony that are difficult to understand because of the complexity of society and the personality. Postmodern thought sees the individual as a series of narratives; for example, Laclau and Mouffe saw that a working-class person is never just a ‘working-class’ person. They may be a single parent, from an ethnic minority, a woman and working class all at the same time. Each of these different facets of the personality may be in antagonism, or conflict, according to Laclau and Mouffe. Class is not a unifying structure at all. Everybody has a subjective view of society that depends on their experience; class identity is only a small part of this, so a class-based revolution is bound to fail. Conflicts will always be a part of society and it will always be unstable and changeable but people can group together, despite antagonisms, to take action at a local level.

  Post-Marxists believe that the conventional democratic process actually alienates many people and they also believe that the state is always open to corruption, even under communism. They see a form of ‘civil society’ as the way forward, where people promote their own interests in the marketplace and achieve change by grouping together for local struggle.

  Where does Marx fit in?

  There is a great deal of argument over whether society has been pushed forward into a new postmodern age or if it is still part of the modernist world. Jürgen Habermas puts forward the idea that we are still living in the last age of the enlightenment, although some people would argue that even the postmodern world is over and we are living in the post-postmodern world. So how is all this relevant to Marx?

  Marx was one of the first people to write about ‘modernity’ in a structured way; he documented the rise of technology and the effects of the Industrial Revolution. He also helped us to realize that society is not always as it seems. In this way he inspired many of the thinkers of the postmodern world, but their t
hought has gone beyond his and they have disagreed with some parts of his philosophy, especially his view that the history of the world is one of class struggle. There is a great deal of debate about the role of class in the world of today. Other groupings of people, along lines of ethnic identity, gender or age, for example, are seen as just as important as class. If there is no such thing as class, in the way that Marx described it, and no oppression by another class, what does that mean to the idea of working-class solidarity? Is there any way that revolution can come about when society seems to be made up of diverse fractured selves without any agreed values? Can the world be transformed by one belief system that attempts to find a solution to all the world’s problems? Postmodern thinkers do not believe that there is a ‘theory of everything’; Marxism is just one of numerous alternative ways of looking at the world – a subjective, grand narrative.

  Radical Marxists, however, would not agree with this. They believe postmodernist theory is just another form of hegemony and an attempt to divert people away from the real problems that exist in the late capitalist world. They believe postmodernists are too busy celebrating popular culture and ignoring the fact that there are still many families living in poverty, even in the Western world, and this will not stop until the capitalist system has been overthrown

  Postmodernism can be seen as a form of cultural relativism, a philosophical belief that there are no universal or absolute truths. The only truths are relative to some frame of reference, in this case culture. This is seen as a problem by those who believe that you should fight against injustice, for how do you decide if something is unjust and how can you make moral or ethical judgements about anything? How far should people tolerate oppression and exploitation? Postmodernism does not have any answers to these questions. It does not even ask the questions.

  Spotlight

  Marx has not yet achieved cultural fame as a Hollywood film icon, but there have been several art films made about him, and a documentary Marx Reloaded directed by Jason Barker that uses animation and interviews with Marxist thinkers to examine the relevance of Marx’s ideas to the most recent economic crisis. See the trailer at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybvsZ7YjBL0

  Is Marxism relevant in the twenty-first century?

  Many people see the collapse of communism as proof that Marx is not relevant to the world today. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down, Communist China became more open to Western influence and its economy is more open to free enterprise. People see the failure of communism as the failure of Marx, yet the communism that Marx envisaged has never existed.

  What the history of the twentieth century shows us is the power of Marx’s ideas to capture the imaginations of the poor and oppressed throughout the world. There is no doubt that his beliefs, or other people’s interpretations of them, changed the history of the world.

  The relevance of Marx to today’s society has been debated and discussed by many philosophers, economists, historians and other academics, as well as by fervent Marxists, students and drunken pub philosophers. Almost everyone has an opinion on Marx, even if it is not a particularly informed one. There are three main arguments:

  1 Marxism is not relevant today at all because it was never relevant. His scientific method was flawed and his economic theory was completely mistaken.

  2 Marxism is not relevant today because it was a product of its time. The capitalist society that existed at the time he was writing does not exist anymore. There is no such thing as the proletariat now, so there will be no revolution. We are living in a postmodern world, which bears no resemblance to the nineteenth century. There is no such thing as class; huge theories of everything are false.

  3 Marxism is still relevant. The failure of communism in some countries does not indicate that Marx was wrong. In fact he predicted there would be a swing away from his theories and that capitalism would try to fight back before it was finally defeated. The world may have changed but while the economy is a capitalist one, his theories are still relevant. Postmodern culture is part of the hegemony and an attempt to make people passive, interested in celebrity but not analysing anything.

  The first theory is obviously wrong because even if Marx was totally mistaken about everything, many people have acted upon what he said, so it must have some relevance. There are still many millions of people living in communist countries, despite the fall of communism. Derrida wrote, in Spectres of Marx, that we can never be free of the past or our interpretations of it, so that Marxism is now a part of our consciousness. Even though Derrida did not agree with the historical materialism of Marxism, he saw that there was still injustice and poverty caused by economic oppression. Marx was the person who brought this to our attention and the problem hasn’t gone away. The debate about the validity of Marx’s methods does not solve anything.

  The second and third theories can both be seen to be correct, to some extent, because of the sheer volume of work that Marx produced; it depends on which aspects of his work are being examined.

  HISTORY

  His ‘scientific method’ of studying history has been accused of not being scientific by modern standards. Karl Popper (1902–94), a twentieth-century philosopher, believed that there is no real way of proving whether Marx’s assertions are true or false as you could in a proper scientific study. He examined this in his book, The Poverty of Historicism, in 1957. However, Marx did amass and classify a great deal of evidence about past societies, and modern social science developed out of his techniques. He wrote and researched in a very structured way that attempted to use the scientific methods of his time, which were concerned with the classification of things.

  ECONOMY

  Marx was not a trained economist. Some of his predictions about the economy have proved to be false, for example, wages being pushed down to subsistence level. On the contrary, the majority of workers are better off in real terms than they were a hundred years ago. However, at the time of writing there is some discussion in the UK about a ‘living wage’, for many low-paid workers find their wages have not kept pace with inflation since the last financial crisis, and many working families qualify for state benefits. Without the safety net of state intervention many people would be at subsistence level.

  ‘The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him.’

  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848, Chapter I

  http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ 1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007

  Other assertions have been correct. Marx predicted that large corporations would come to dominate world markets. At the end of the twentieth century, more and more companies merged into large conglomerates including banks, publishers and computer software companies. In the twenty-first century the trend continues with large supermarket chains taking each other over, buying up properties and forcing small shops out of business, and there have been proposed mergers in pharmaceutical and media industries. Marx also predicted that industry would become more and more reliant on technology and that there would be periodic recessions – both of these predictions are correct. The latest economic recession began in 2007 with problems in the housing market, and escalated into a full-blown global financial crisis by 2008 that was partly attributed to a failure to regulate vast banking corporations. There is still discussion in 2014 about whether or not this recession is ending.

  The last financial crisis led to a huge re-evaluation of Marx, and discussion o
f Marxism seems to be ‘fashionable’ again in the media. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek (1949–) has gathered a wide global following after writing many popular academic books and media opinion pieces, and making films on the reassessment of Marxist thought on revolution and ideology, despite his often elliptical style of writing. In his 2009 book In Defence of Lost Causes he discusses a renewed possibility of global communism.

  CLASS AND SOCIETY

  Society has changed for the better; in the Western world many inequalities have disappeared. Universal suffrage has changed the structure of society since Marx’s time. In the UK we have free education up to university level and health services for all who need them, although many would see this as a two-tier system where the rich can afford to pay for better private treatment and education. However, it is still a great improvement on the Victorian era and the lives and health of most people in the UK are better as a result. The feudal House of Lords has been reformed; heredity is no longer the only criterion for belonging to this law-making body.

  Although the proletariat as Marx described it does not exist in the same way today in Western economies, people still refer to themselves as ‘wage slaves’ and work hard to pay off debts to credit card companies. Debt is becoming a major problem in the UK as many people get caught up in the consumerist society. We saw earlier, in Chapter 4, that French economist Thomas Piketty has shown how inequality in Western society is growing; there is an increasing gap between the rich and the poor and, as Marx predicted, there is also still a huge underclass of the homeless and the unemployed.

  Spotlight