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THE RED CRITIQUE |
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(D)evolutionary
Socialism and the Containment of Class: For a Red Theory of Class
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The
growing contradictions of the contemporary situation in which the increase
of wealth simply intensifies social inequality instead of bringing about
economic and cultural equality have shown not simply the inadequacy, but
the frivolousness of the explanations of the daily offered by the dominant
cultural and social theory. Frivolous explanations—by which I mean
various "post" theories—obscure the logic that relates culture
to capital and are unable to explain the actual, material practices that
produce people as subjects. By "subject," I mean individuals not
as they appear in their own or other people’s imaginations, as Zizek and
other left theorists have mapped subjectivity. Rather, I mean individuals,
as Marx and Engels have written, as they "produce materially and
hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and
conditions independent of their will." "Frivolous theory"
cannot explain, without "any mystification and speculation" as
Marx and Engels emphasize, "the connection of the social and
political structure with production" (The German Ideology
46-7). The
logic of the "frivolous" is the dominant Derridean mode of
understanding cultural practices. Derrida, in his 1973 (1980) book The
Archeology of the Frivolous, does what he does in every text: he
textualizes all practices as effects of the slippage of signifiers and
thereby foregrounds the gap between the sign and its referent as both the
gap that needs to be explained and as one that is immanent, an effect of
the laws of motion of any symbolic system. He thus both displaces onto the
plane of the epistemological the gap between the classes, and he treats
language transhistorically, displacing Volosinov's argument that the
"sign" is "an arena of class struggle" (23). By
arguing further that "philosophical style congenitally leads to
frivolity" (125), Derrida defers explanation itself onto the plane of
the rhetorical and semiotic. This series of deferrals, disguised as
epistemological relays, of course also defers explanation of the relation
between culture and production. Because the frivolous posits the limits of
knowledge as transhistorical, unrelated to the limits imposed on it by
history understood as the struggle of antagonistic classes over ownership
of the means of production, it also posits that no class or social
movement can ever produce knowledge that is reliable enough to guide
emancipatory action. The unreliability of knowledge is simply "the
way things are." Political struggle itself is thus transformed into
the frivolous: an endless and excessive quest driven by desire for the
ineluctable signified, where the best one can hope for is a little more of
"what is." The frivolous, then, is an idealist and rather hollow
mode of reading whose privileging of the semiotic for its ambiguity
represents the interests of the bourgeoisie in blocking the development of
revolutionary consciousness, and at the moment when the global divide
between the haves and the have-nots is increasing. The gap that needs to
be explored is the gap between the classes, not the gap between the sign
and its referent that is privileged and reified by frivolous theory. What
is necessary now, if one is serious about changing the material conditions
of the everyday for all, is a materialist explanation: one that can lay
bare the logic of cultural practices and explain the crisis of explanation
through dialectical understanding of the relation between productive
practices and culture. Materialist explanation de-isolates culture,
treating it not (as "post" theories have done) as a series of
autonomous localities, but as an aspect of the totality of practices in
which subjects engage as they produce the means of their reproduction as
an aggregate. The contemporary return to the concept of class marks the
exhaustion of textual logic and is supposed to signal a turn away from
frivolous "post" explanations that are complicit with
capitalism. But class, in its new rearticulation, is simply a repetition
of the frivolous. In
the heyday of the frivolous, class was of course the absent term. But in
the early 1990s, when the frivolous began to show signs of explanatory
fatigue even to its practitioners, class returned to the humanities. The
contradictions, conflicts and antagonisms of the "two great classes
directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat" (Marx and
Engels, The Communist Manifesto 80) could no longer be explained by
the frivolous, which therefore began to look overtly frivolous and had to
be repaired. Thus, Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin’s Critical
Terms for Literary Study, whose first edition pointedly excluded
class, now includes an entry on class. However, the essay
"Class," written by Daniel T. O’Hara, engages in one of the
more common of frivolous tactics used to marginalize class and exclude it
from the scene of the daily: the use of irony, pastiche, joke, wordplay.
O’Hara treats class as an orphan trope and then adopts it so it can be
used "strategically, pragmatically, with a certain ironic, even
(self-) parodic lightness" (418). This tactic is in actuality the
popular device for unleashing violence on revolutionaries from behind a
smiling face. It is repeated in the "Rethinking Marxism" poster
we all received: in the slogan "The party’s not over,"
"party" is not a concept but a puncept whose undecidability
blocks the necessary reliable knowledge for revolution. Even
theorists whose work has been primarily in poststructuralism are now
forced to recognize the frivolity of their post-explanations and mend them
with "class." Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore, for
example, in introducing their anthology Rethinking Class, revise
class under the trope of "rethinking" and transform it into yet
another cultural difference exchangeable with any other. In doing so, they
engage in crisis management for the knowledge industry by deploying the
tactic, as Donald Morton has theorized it, of "set[ting] the limits
of the horizon surveyed in such a way as to occlude the ‘troublesome,’
while claiming to open up issues to the full spectrum of ‘reasonable’
views" ("Texts of Limits" 57). By returning to class from
within the framework of the ludic logic of "disruption,"
"questions of cause and effect, of figure and ground, . . . become
matters of interpretation, matters of uncertain conjecture" (3). The
ideological services of the two to the bourgeois knowledge industry might
be seen in their conclusion in which, to the relief of the bourgeoisie,
they declare that class might "turn out to be as much an effect as it
is a cause. . . . If this weakens the explanatory power accorded class in
orthodox Marxism, what is gained is a broader spectrum of permissible
questions" (3). The "troublesome" they occlude in this move
is the red theory of class theorized by Marx as an objective and therefore
knowable and transformable position in relation to private property. Yet
reading their text, highly praised by Cora Kaplan in her Introduction to
the "Rereading Class" issue of PMLA, one is struck by the
contradictions of such performative rethinking and must ask: if class
struggle is over, then why, as they propose, revive "class"? And
what can it mean, if such struggle is over, to revive the term so it can
be used, as they say, "with . . . political efficacy" and
"analytic authority" (1)? The un-said of their revisionist
practice is, of course, that not only is class not dead and class
struggle not over—but that class is so active under the surface
that it needs containment, and it needs it quickly, efficiently. Frivolous
practices continue in dominant cultural theory, albeit in less overtly
frivolous form, in the many texts undertaking exploration of the gap
between the representation of "class" and "class
being" such as Peter Hitchcock’s recent essay in the special
"Rereading Class" issue of PMLA. Hitchcock argues that
what "haunts the current epoch, when workers exist but apparently
have no representational hold on a political machinery that would
transform their existence," is "the difference of the objective
conditions of class formation from the political forms of its
expression" (22). In his attempt, however, to "expand. . . a
lexicon of labor" (20) "in cultural critique that. . . might
just militate against the tendency to build barricades around workers
through representation" (23), he repeatedly argues that "the
nature of class as a relation denies. . . representation" (29),
basically because "one cannot easily represent it in culture without
making the representation itself an example of the object of
critique" (24). This return to representation rehearses the paradoxy
of Horkheimer and Adorno’s "Enlightenment as Mass Deception"
by substituting a formalist understanding of representation that displaces
theory as that which, as Marx puts it, "represents a class" (Afterword
to the Second German Edition of Capital 1: 17). By displacing
theory as such, Hitchcock opens a space for an argument that presupposes
class relations are mere matter for processes of representation rather
than material relations which decisively determine processes of
representation themselves. As Hitchcock himself states, "class
relations. . . are a precipitate in the moment and context of
representation" (27). Following from the presupposition that class
relations are mere matter for representation that will always exceed
representation—which repeats the ludic logic of the frivolous in which
the signifier and signified always stand in a relation of excess to one
another—neither class relations nor classes can be apprehended in any
reliable way. Thus transformative praxis cannot occur. Workers can engage
only in rhetorical socialist activism in which they constitute and
reconstitute themselves as various cultural classes in competition over
local interests such that they merely "oscillate wildly" within
the frame of "what is" rather than contest "what is"
to produce "what can be." The reduction of class to mere matter
for representation, which displaces class as a determinate relationship to
the means of production, establishes redistributive reform as the horizon
of worker praxis. Indeed, when Hitchcock notes that workers have "no
obvious space or place to seek redress from" capitalist violences
(27), he accepts capitalism as a given and suggests that the work of the
left is to engage in merely reformist practices. While in a footnote he
rejects the theorizations found in the Dimock and Gilmore volume because
they "reduce class to primarily a series of effects or
epiphenomena" (30 n2), in fact he repeats this reduction. I
will note only briefly that the repetition of the frivolous at the site of
class is not without precedent. Dominant versions of cultural studies,
central to which is the work of Stuart Hall, long ago revised
"class" beyond recognition. For example, in the 1976 essay,
"The ‘Political’ and ‘Economic’ in Marx’s Theory of
Classes," Hall rejects classical Marxism and argues that the
contradictions of material life are neither determinate nor explanatory,
but simply consist of "matter" to represent: "a process of
‘representation’," he argues, "must have something to
represent" (50). Hall’s turn to representation entails the
reduction of classes articulated at the level of production to mere
"matter" for representation which, once they pass from the
"economic" to the political, "cannot," Hall claims,
"be translated back into [the] original terms" (47
original emphasis). In reducing class to matter—a move Hitchcock has
repeated—Hall inserts the frivolous into cultural studies, and thus in
the dominant cultural studies, the semiotic laws of motion of language are
determinate: desire (for "closure")—not labor—is the motive
force of history, and therefore the "disclosure" of
representation is privileged. What this privileging of the
"disclosure" of representation means in practice, however, is
that the proletariat as articulated by the social relations of production cannot
constitute itself as a class at the level of culture. Hall’s
"re-reading" of Marx suppresses class politics by privileging
the politics of difference. The
ludic "rereading" of class exemplified by Dimock and Gilmore and
celebrated in the special January 2000 PMLA issue on class has
opened up a thread in "class studies" in which "class"
becomes collapsed into the Weberian notion of "status" as
"an effective claim to social esteem in terms of positive or negative
privileges" (Economy and Society 1: 305). "Class" is
reduced to a relation involving the respect one can command from others,
displacing the classical Marxist understanding of class as relationship to
the means of production. Exemplary of this thread is Rita Felski’s PMLA
essay, "Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle
Classes." Having rejected the classical Marxist theory of class as a
binary (34), she regards class as "being, in one sense, nothing more
than the sum of its material manifestations: the Anne Klein suits and
goat-cheese soufflés, the high-definition TV and laptop computer, the
postmodern novels and the holidays in Tuscany" (38). For her, then,
class "has a contingency not shared by other forms of identity. . . .
if we think of class in purely economic and sociological terms"
(38-9). Yet she "complicates" the contingency of class identity,
suggesting it is not so contingent—not, however, because it involves
relationship to production but because she, following the example of other
revisionists such as Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams,
believes it is rooted in "structures of feeling" not so easily
left behind. The identity of the "lower middle classes"—an
identity she adopts in the essay—is rooted in "shame," which
makes it a "negative identity" that is hidden behind the claim
to middle class "status" (41). Here, class is ultimately reduced
further: to "trauma" over one’s "status," where
"status" is the Zizekian "real" which, while it
momentarily intrudes and tears the "fragile, symbolic cobweb"
Zizek imagines "social reality" to be (17), is nevertheless
unknowable. Felski’s essay is little more than a call for others to
recognize—to identify in a positive way, or "respect"—the
"lower middle class" which she argues contemporary cultural
theory (the work of Stuart Hall in particular) ignores (43-4). Felski's
essay is symptomatic of the larger reactionary tendency in the knowledge
industry today to return class to its bourgeois, Weberian schematization.
Against Marx who argues that persons are articulated into classes on the
basis of their objective relation to private property, Weber claims that
articulation into classes occurs in relation to consumption:
"always," Weber argues, "this is the generic connotation of
the concept of class: that the kind of chance in the market is the
decisive moment which presents a common condition for the individual’s
fate. ‘Class situation’ is . . . ultimately ‘market
situation’" (Economy and Society 2: 928, original
emphasis). Weberian theory is the classical matrix of bourgeois
sociological theory because by positing class as constituted at the level
of circulation and consumption (the market), it institutes a conceptual
pluralism in which power involves not the labor-power that has been
appropriated and congealed in the means of production and used to
appropriate more labor-power for profit. Rather, "power" in
Weberian theory involves anything one could be said to
"own"—from land, to commodities, to knowledge. This is a
"matterist" understanding of power which extends to personal
qualities—for example, the facility or "style" with which one
engages in various modalities of consumption or "ways of using,"
which stand in for production. This latter substitution for ownership of
the means of production of a quality one could be said to own—a
substitution repeated by Michel de Certeau who proclaims
"consumption" to be another form of "production"
(31)—displaces the determining centrality of labor and exploitation in
thinking the social, and opens the door to desire and excitation as the
motive forces behind historic social change. The
philosophical basis of such a conceptual pluralism which substitutes
desire for labor is the neo-Kantian project of the "empirio-criticists"
(or "Machists," as Lenin refers to them). That project arose at
the same time as Weber wrote. Lenin, following Engels (in Socialism,
14-15), critiqued it in Materialism and Empirio-criticism as
agnosticism. Agnosticism
attempts to carve out a "middle-ground" position between
idealism and materialism. As Lenin explains, "for the materialist the
‘factually given’ is the outer world, the image of which is our
sensations. For the idealist the ‘factually given’ is sensation, and
the outer world is declared to be a ‘complex of sensations’. For the
agnostic the ‘immediately given’ is also sensation, but the agnostic
does not go on either to the materialist recognition of the reality of the
outer world, or to the idealist recognition of the world as our
sensation" (98). The agnostic stops at "‘sense-perceptions,’
impressions and ideas of man" (98), and thus while he denies both
idealist and materialist premises, he is "inevitably condemn[ed] . .
. to idealist conclusions of one kind or another" (Lenin Materialism
151). The agnostic, in other words, is the frivolous. The Weberian theory
of class is a form of agnosticism in that by pluralizing property as
anything anyone might be said to own, it accords
"sense-perception" a foundational status and in this way denies
objective reality that is given through sensation. Reality, in the
Weberian theory of class, is instead "conditional" on
sense-perception—that is, what is "class," what is
"property" . . . what is "real" is a matter of one’s
ideas and impressions. This position is quite useful to the bourgeoisie,
because at the level of politics, it produces stalemate. Without any
objective measure or model, no theory can be accorded priority, and
nothing historically decisive can be done. One is subject to the
"waiting without horizon of expectation" privileged by Derrida
in his frivolity, Specters of Marx (168). Through
such conceptual pluralism, class in Weberian theory is reduced to a matter
of "having," in and of itself, unrelated to the "not
having" of others, such that there is no way to think an objective,
causal relation between the fact that Bill Gates has a half billion
dollars while those who produce microchips for Microsoft have only enough
income to survive on, if that. Like "post" theories of class,
Weberian versions treat the social as an infinitely expanding alea
comprised of a series of autonomous localities whose collisions at
unforeseeable conjunctural moments produce effects, which themselves
become undecidable factors in future conjunctural collisions. Indeed, it
is precisely because Weberian class rejects the understanding of the
social as a totality that John R. Hall argues for a neo-Weberian
understanding of class in his introduction to the Reworking Class
volume: "once it is acknowledged that market capacities, class
interests, and organizational exploitation become structured in diverse
ways within capitalism, the theoretical gaps between Marxian and Weberian
approaches are largely erased, and the Weberian analysis of structurations
within capitalism becomes ever more salient" (31). Underlying
both the frivolous and the Weberian is the understanding of change in
terms of "increase or decrease," the "more or less" of
the same that Lenin critiqued as opposing dialectics, which understands
the social as a split unity whose antagonistic opposites exist in a
contradictory relation of reciprocity. Dialectics explains why an entity
so split can become transformed, on its own contradictory laws of motion,
into a new entity. The other understanding of change, Lenin argues,
"leaves cause in the shade" ("On the Question of
Dialectics" 131). Both the frivolous and the Weberian leave cause in
the shade: change in the former is the outcome of semiotic slippage, and
in the latter, agnosticist shifts in sense. Both are useful in suppressing
proletariat struggle to transform the objective cause of
inequity—private ownership of the means of production—and in
simultaneously advancing the "popular" understanding that there
is a vast plurality of differences that need to form coalitions for the
advancement of "popular" interests. The logic of change as
"increase or decrease" is that which informed the evolutionary
socialism of Eduard Bernstein and now underwrites the contemporary
"Third Way" or "Progressive Governance" reformist
initiative, which I call (d)evolutionary socialism. Third
Wayism is supported by Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio’s highly
influential book The Jobless Future. At its core is the logic of
"increase or decrease" which informs their plan to create and
mobilize coalitions of cultural classes in order to build a power bloc
which can presumably provide "more" for "the people"
by putting pressure on the state to give "less" to corporations.
In doing so, they hope that capitalism can be (d)evolved into a more
equitable system. For Aronowitz and DiFazio, what is "central to the
constitution of class" is culture (274-5; 296). They "do not
accept Weber’s view" (231) because for them, Weber is unable to
account for the "centrality of culture" they privilege in the
"making of" class. They want a more fluid notion of class as
produced not only by "market situation" but also by
"cultural situation"—the life chances afforded any group by
the "conscious community" that is for them synonymous with class
(290). Aronowitz and DiFazio, then, reject Weber—but not because Weber
pluralizes property. Rather, they reject Weber for being too
deterministic! Formulating class as "conscious community,"
Aronowitz and DiFazio are able to posit that there can be a "relative
autonomy of knowledge and culture" within capitalism itself (292). In
this "autonomous" space, the "New Class" of knowledge
science workers theorized several decades ago by Alvin Gouldner can emerge
(294) and "transform" the "workplace" so as to enable
"popular politics" (357-8). Fundamentally, Aronowitz and DiFazio
are positing a "break" in knowledge society in which the
"vanguard" is this "new class" of knowledge science
workers. Because these knowledge workers can argue that they
"own" as "property" the knowledge which Aronowitz and
DiFazio claim is now "central" to production (291), Aronowitz
and DiFazio think these workers—themselves among them—can radicalize
their autonomy and (d)evolve the social by redistributing power, and
without transforming production. On these grounds, Aronowitz and DiFazio
renarrate the objective contradictions of capitalism by which capitalism
both negates itself and creates the conditions of possibility for a new
mode of production in which producers produce for themselves. At
a high level of development, the contradictions of capitalism jettison
more and more workers (hence "the jobless future") because the
productive forces have been developed through class struggle over the rate
of profit such that less socially necessary labor time is required to
produce commodities. A society in which all persons are freed from
exploitation is objectively possible. Yet as Marx explains and Ernest
Mandel has more recently illustrated, because under capitalism labor
remains the sole measure and source of value, the capitalist class cannot,
much as it may desire to do so, get rid of all workers; that would mean
the bourgeoisie could not extract profit—surplus-value. Fundamentally,
the capitalist class is trying to prevent the objective self-negation of
capitalism, yet it is precisely through these preventative moves that it
increasingly brings about that objective self-negation. Aronowitz and
DiFazio address this contradictory law of motion of capital—but they do
so undialectically, proposing a (d)evolutionary social democratic
"solution" through tactics of redistribution: for example,
shortening the working day but with no decrease in pay. Rather than
transforming the social relations of production which are the determinate
condition of possibility of "work," rather than bringing the
objective exterior to bear on the inside in order to control the form of
production through which humans attempt to meet their needs, Aronowitz and
DiFazio try simply to control "work" and "wages." This
move attempts to mitigate the effects of the objective contradictions of
capitalism so that they do not become the basis of revolutionary change.
This is the fundamental project of Third Way reformism, with knowledge
workers as the so-called vanguard of a project that "attempts,"
as Giddens puts it, "to transcend both old-style social democracy and
neoliberalism" (26). In
the end, the question is this: does the knowledge-work that is dominant in
the academy support capitalism by naturalizing (explaining away) its
objective contradictions? Or does it provide historical knowledge of it,
and thus participate in the struggle of the proletariat to transform it?
It is historically necessary now to break the bourgeois chains of
frivolity, at the center of which is the cross of indeterminacy used to
ward off revolution and the red critique, whose purpose is "to
clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the
struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat" (Lenin, What
80). Works
Cited Aronowitz,
Stanley and William DiFazio. The Jobless Future. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Certeau,
Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Stephen Redall.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Derrida,
Jacques. The Archeology of the Frivolous. Trans. John P. Leavey.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1987. _____.
Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge, 1994. Dimock,
Wai Chee and Michael T. Gilmore. Introduction. In Dimock and Gilmore.
1-14. _____,
eds. Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Engels,
Frederick. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Trans. Edward Aveling.
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Rita. "Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle
Class." PMLA 115 (Jan. 2000): 33-45. Giddens,
Anthony. The Third Way. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998. Hall,
John R., ed. Reworking Class. Ithaca and London: Cornell University
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"The Reworking of Class Analysis." In Hall, John R. 1-37. Hall,
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Peter. "They Must Be Represented? Problems in Theories of
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Alan, ed. Class and Class Structure. London: Lawrence and Wishart,
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Cora. "Introduction: Millennial Class." PMLA 115 (Jan.
2000): 9-19. Lenin,
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"On the Question of Dialectics." In Selsam and Martel. 130-132. _____.
What Is To Be Done? New York: International Publishers, 1969. Lentricchia,
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Ernest. Late Capitalism. Trans. Joris de Bres. London: Verso, 1978.
Marx,
Karl. Afterword to the Second German Edition. In Capital. Vol. 1.
12-20. _____.
Capital. Ed. Frederick Engels. Translated from the Third German
Edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Vol. 1. New York:
International Publishers, 1967. _____
and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Penguin
Books, 1986. _____.
The German Ideology: Part One. Ed. C.J. Arthur. New York:
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Donald. "Texts of Limits, the Limits of Texts, and the Containment of
Politics in Contemporary Critical Theory." diacritics 20.1
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Daniel T. "Class." In Lentricchia and McLaughlin. 406-428. Volosinov,
V.I. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. L. Matejka and
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Claus Wittich. Trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978. Zizek,
Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular
Culture. Cambridge, MA: October Books, 1992. THE
RED CRITIQUE 1(Spring 2001) |