What is Orthodox Marxism and
Why it Matters Now More Than Ever Before
Stephen Tumino
1
Orthodox Marxism and the Contemporary
(D)evolutionary
Socialism
Deborah Kelsh
Corporate
Transnationalism and Red Internationalism
Amrohini Sahay
Class,
Labor and the "Cyber": A Red Critique of the
"Post-Work" Ideologies
Rob Wilkie
Eclipsing
Exploitation:
Transnational Feminism, Sex Work and the State
Jennifer Cotter
Haven't
you realized that workers have it pretty good today
Brian Ganter
Revolution
as Seduction, Pedagogy as Therapy and The Subject is Always Me
The Red Collective
One
Any effective political theory will have to do at least
two things: it will have to offer an integrated understanding of social
practices and, based on such an interrelated knowledge, offer a
guideline for praxis. My main argument here is that among all contesting
social theories now, only Orthodox Marxism has been able to produce an
integrated knowledge of the existing social totality and provide lines
of praxis that will lead to building a society free from necessity.
But first I must clarify what I mean by Orthodox
Marxism. Like all other modes and forms of political theory, the very
theoretical identity of Orthodox Marxism is itself contested—not just
from non-and anti-Marxists who question the very "real" (by which they
mean the "practical" as under free-market criteria) existence of any
kind of Marxism now but, perhaps more tellingly, from within the Marxist
tradition itself. I will, therefore, first say what I regard to be the
distinguishing marks of Orthodox Marxism and then outline a short
polemical map of contestation over Orthodox Marxism within the Marxist
theories now. I will end by arguing for its effectivity in bringing
about a new society based not on human rights but on freedom from
necessity.
I will argue that to know contemporary society—and to be
able to act on such knowledge—one has to first of all know what makes
the existing social totality. I will argue that the dominant social
totality is based on inequality—not just inequality of power but
inequality of economic access (which then determines access to health
care, education, housing, diet, transportation, . . . ). This systematic
inequality cannot be explained by gender, race, sexuality, disability,
ethnicity, or nationality. These are all secondary contradictions and
are all determined by the fundamental contradiction of capitalism which
is inscribed in the relation of capital and labor. All modes of Marxism
now explain social inequalities primarily on the basis of these
secondary contradictions and in doing so—and this is my main
argument—legitimate capitalism. Why? Because such arguments authorize
capitalism without gender, race, discrimination and thus accept economic
inequality as an integral part of human societies. They accept a sunny
capitalism—a capitalism beyond capitalism. Such a society, based on
cultural equality but economic inequality, has always been the
not-so-hidden agenda of the bourgeois left—whether it has been called
"new left," "postmarxism," or "radical democracy." This is, by the way,
the main reason for its popularity in the culture industry—from the
academy (Jameson, Harvey, Haraway, Butler,. . . ) to daily politics
(Michael Harrington, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson,. . . ) to. . . . For
all, capitalism is here to stay and the best that can be done is to make
its cruelties more tolerable, more humane. This humanization (not
eradication) of capitalism is the sole goal of ALL contemporary lefts (marxism,
feminism, anti-racism, queeries, . . . ).
Such an understanding of social inequality is based on
the fundamental understanding that the source of wealth is human
knowledge and not human labor. That is, wealth is produced by the human
mind and is thus free from the actual objective conditions that shape
the historical relations of labor and capital. Only Orthodox Marxism
recognizes the historicity of labor and its primacy as the source of all
human wealth. In this paper I argue that any emancipatory theory has to
be founded on recognition of the priority of Marx's labor theory of
value and not repeat the technological determinism of corporate theory
("knowledge work") that masquerades as social theory.
Finally, it is only Orthodox Marxism that recognizes the
inevitability and also the necessity of communism—the necessity, that
is, of a society in which "from each according to their ability to each
according to their needs" (Marx) is the rule.
Two
Why Everyone has Suddenly Become an Orthodox Marxist
A parody of politics has taken over left politics in the
U.S. and Europe. A parody in which—after the dead-end of the designer
socialisms of postmarxisms—suddenly everyone is an "orthodox"
Marxist: from Zizek who in the introduction to a selection of his work
writes of the need to "return to the centrality of the Marxist critique
of political economy" (Reader ix); to Michael Sprinker who
referred to himself as a "neo-conservative marxist" ("Forum"
68). In calling himself a "neoconservative" Sprinker was embracing with
pride Butler's definition of the term in her "Merely Cultural" in which
she equates it with "leftist orthodoxy" (268). Then there is Paul Smith
who now, after mocking Orthodox Marxism in Discerning the Subject
and Universal Abandon, says he has a "fairly orthodox
understanding of what Marx and the Marxist tradition has had to say
about capitalism" (Millennial Dreams 3).
Parody is always the effect of a slippage and the
slippage here is that in spite of the sudden popularity of "orthodox"
Marxism, the actual theories and practices of the newly orthodox
are more than ever before flexodox. It seems as if once more
Lenin's notion that when the class antagonism emerges more sharply "the
liberals. . . dare not deny the class struggle, but attempt to narrow
down [and] to curtail. . . the concept" ("Liberal and Marxist
Conceptions of the Class Struggle," 122) has been proven by history.
"Orthodox" Marxism has become the latest cover by which
the bourgeois left authenticates its credentials and proceeds to
legitimate the economics of the ruling class and its anti-proletarian
politics.
Take Paul Smith, for example. In Orthodox Marxism class
is the central issue. (I put aside here that in his writings, on
subjectivity for example, Smith has already gotten rid of the "central"
by a deconstructive logic). What Smith does with class is a rather
interesting test of how Orthodox Marxism is being used to legitimate the
class interests of the owners. Smith reworks class and turns it into a
useless Habermasian communicative act. He writes that "classes are what
are formed in struggle, not something that exists prior to struggle" (Millennial
Dreams 60). To say it again: the old ideological textualization of
the "new left" is not working any more (just look at the resistance
against globalization), so the ruling class is now reworking the "old
left" to defend itself. Against the Orthodox Marxist theory of class,
Smith evacuates class of an objective basis in the extraction of surplus
labor in production, and makes it the effect of local conflicts. In
short, Smith reverses the Orthodox Marxist position that, "It is not the
consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary,
their social being that determines their consciousness" (Marx,
Contribution, 21), and turns it into a neomarxist view that what
matters is their consciousness. In this he in fact shares a great deal
with conservative theories that make "values" (the subjective) as what
matters in social life and not economic access.
Zizek provides another example of the flexodox parody of
Marxism today. Capitalism in Orthodox Marxism is explained as an
historical mode of production based on the privatization of the means of
subsistence in the hands of a few, i.e., the systemic exploitation of
labor by capital. Capitalism is the world-historic regime of unpaid
surplus-labor. In Zizek's writings, capitalism is not based on
exploitation in production (surplus-labor), but on struggles over
consumption ("surplus-enjoyment"). The Orthodox Marxist concepts that
lay bare the exploitative production relations in order to change them
are thus replaced with a "psycho-marxist" pastiche of consumption in his
writings, a revisionist move that has proven immensely successful in the
bourgeois cultural criticism. Zizek, however, has taken to representing
this displacement of labor (production) with desire (consumption) as
"strictly correlative" to the concept of "revolutionary praxis" found in
the texts of Orthodox Marxism (e.g., "Repeating Lenin"). Revolutionary
practice is always informed by class consciousness and transformative
cultural critique has always aimed at producing class consciousness by
laying bare the false consciousness that ruling ideology institutes in
the everyday. Transformative cultural critique, in other words, is
always a linking of consciousness to production practices from which a
knowledge of social totality emerges. Zizek, however, long ago abandoned
Orthodox Marxist ideology critique as an epistemologically naïve theory
of "ideology" because it could not account for the persistence of
"desire" beyond critique (the "enlightened false-consciousness" of
The Sublime Object of Ideology, Mapping Ideology,. . . ). His
more recent "return to the centrality of the Marxist critique" is, as a
result, a purely tropic voluntarism of the kind he endlessly celebrates
in his diffusionist readings of culture as desire-al moments when social
norms are violated and personal emotions spontaneously experienced as
absolutely compulsory (as "drive"). His concept of revolutionary Marxist
praxis consists of re-describing it as an "excessive" lifestyle choice
(analogous to pedophilia and other culturally marginalized practices,
The Ticklish Subject 381-8). On this reading, Marxism is the only
metaphorical displacement of "desire" into "surplus-pleasure" that makes
imperative the "direct socialization of the productive process" (Ticklish
Subject 350) and that thus causes the subjects committed to it to
experience a Symbolic death at the hands of the neoliberal culture
industry. It is this "affirmative" reversal of the right-wing
anti-Marxist narrative that makes Zizek's writings so highly praised in
the bourgeois "high-theory" market—where it is read as "subtle" and an
example of "deep thinking" because it confirms a transcendental position
considered above politics by making all politics ideological. If
everything is ideology then there can be no fundamental social change
only formal repetition and reversal of values (Nietzsche). Zizek's
pastiche of psycho-marxism thus consists in presenting what is only
theoretically possible for the capitalist—those few who have already
met, in excess, their material needs through the exploitation of the
labor of the other and who can therefore afford to elaborate fantasies
of desire—as a universal form of agency freely available to everyone.
Psycho-marxism does what bourgeois ideology has always
done—maintain the bourgeois hegemony over social production by
commodifying, through an aesthetic relay, the contradictions of the
wages system. What bourgeois ideology does above all is deny that the
mode of social production has an historic agency of its own independent
of the subject. Zizek's "return" to "orthodox" Marxism erases its
materialist theory of desire—that "our wants and their satisfaction have
their origin in society" (Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital, 33) and
do not stand in "excess" of it. In fact, he says exactly the opposite
and turns the need for Orthodox Marxist theory now into a phantom desire
of individuals: he makes "class struggle" an effect of a "totalitarian"
desire to polarize the social between "us" and "them" (using the
"friend/enemy" binary found in the writings of the Nazi Carl Schmitt,
Ticklish Subject 226).
What is basic only to Orthodox Marxist theory, however,
which is what enables it to produce class consciousness through a
critique of ideology, is its materialist prioritization of "need" over
"desire." Only Orthodox Marxism recognizes that although capitalism is
compelled to continually expand the needs of workers because of the
profit motive it at the same time cannot satisfy these needs because of
its logic of profit. "Desire" is always an effect of class relations, of
the gap between the material level and historical potential of the
forces of production and the social actuality of un-met needs.
In spite of their formal "criticality," the writings of
Zizek, Spivak, Smith, Hennessy and other theorists of designer
socialisms produce concepts that legitimate the existing social
relations. The notion of class in their work, for example, is the one
that now is commonly deployed in the bourgeois newspapers. In their
reporting on what has become known as the "Battle of Seattle," and in
the coverage of the rising tide of protest against the financial
institutions of U.S. monopoly capital which are pillaging the nations of
the South, the bourgeois media represents the emergent class struggles
as a matter of an alternative "lifestyle choice" (e.g., the Los
Angeles Times, "Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Catch Our Anti-Corporate Puppet
Show!"). On this diffusional narrative, "class" is nothing more than an
opportunity for surplus-pleasure "outside" the market for those who have
voluntarily "discarded" the normal pleasures of U.S. culture. It is the
same "lifestyle" politics that in the flexodox marxism of Antonio Negri
is made an autonomous zone of "immaterial labor" which he locates as the
"real communism" that makes existing society post-capitalist already so
that revolution is not necessary (Empire). What is at the core of
both the flexodox marxism and the popular culture of class as
"lifestyle" is a de-politicization of the concepts of Orthodox Marxism
which neutralizes them as indexes of social inequality and reduces them
to merely descriptive categories which take what is for what ought to
be. Take the writings of Pierre Bourdieu for example. Bourdieu turns
Marx's dialectical concepts of "class" and "capital" which lay bare the
social totality, into floating "categories" and reflexive
"classifications" that can be formally applied to any social practice
because they have been cut off from their connection to the objective
global relations of production. Bourdieu, in short, legitimates the
pattern of class as "lifestyle" in the bourgeois media by his view that
"class" is an outcome of struggles over "symbolic capital" in any
"field." I leave aside here that his diffusion of the logic of capital
into "cultural capital," "educational capital" and the like is itself
part of a depoliticization of the relation between capital and labor and
thus a blurring of class antagonism. What Bourdieu's "field" theory of
class struggle does is segregate the struggles into so many autonomous
zones lacking in systemic determination by the historic structure of
property so that everyone is considered to be equally in possession of
"capital" (ownership is rhetorically democratized) making socialist
revolution unnecessary. What the reduction of "class" and "capital" to
the self-evidency of local cultural differences cannot explain is the
systemic primacy of the production of surplus-value in unpaid-labor, the
basic condition of the global majority which determines that their needs
are not being met and compels them into collective class struggles.
Without totalizing knowledge of exploitation—which is
why such dialectical concepts as "capital" form the basis of Orthodox
Marxist class theory—exploitation cannot be abolished. The cultural
idealism of the de-politicized voiding of Marxist concepts fits right in
with the "volunteer-ism" of the neoliberals and "compassionate"
conservatives that they use to justify their massive privatization
programs. Considering class struggle politics as a matter of cultural
struggles over symbolic status is identical to the strategy of
considering the dismantling of social welfare as an opportunity for
"local" agency freed from coercive state power, i.e., the bedrock of the
"non-governmental" activism and "community" building of the bourgeois
reformists. When President select Bush seeks to mobilize what he calls
the "armies of compassion" against the "Washington insiders" and return
"power" to the "people" it is the old cultural studies logic that all
politics is "people vs. power bloc," a warmed over popular frontism that
makes politics a matter of building de-politicized cross-class
coalitions for bourgeois right, utopic models of a post-political social
order without class struggle possessing equality of representation that
excludes the revolutionary vanguard. As Marx and Engels said of the
"bourgeois socialists" of their day, such utopian measures "at. . .
best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of
bourgeois government" (Manifesto of the Communist Party,
Selected Works, 59). Zizek's "affirmation" of revolutionary Marxism
as a "totalitarian" desire that polarizes the cultural "lifeworld"
between "friends" and "enemies" is another relay of
"class-as-an-after-effect of 'struggle'" of the networked left. What the
parody does is make class struggle a rhetorical "invention" of Marx(ists)
analogous to the bourgeois "rights" politics of the transnational
coalitional regime of exploitation ruling today, and erases the need for
a global theory of social change. Orthodox Marxism cuts through the
closed atmosphere of the "friends" of the networked left and their
embrace of a voluntarist "compassionate" millenarianism with a critique
from outside so to expose the global collective need for a revolutionary
social theory and red cultural studies to end exploitation for all.
Three
The Left Party-s
The goal of the left "bal masque" is perhaps most
clearly represented in the image for the "Marxism 2000" conference on
millennial marxism—the poster for Rethinking Marxism which is the
organ of the contemporary neoliberalism masquerading as "Marxism." The
poster, which opportunistically appropriates Diego Rivera's "Dance in
Tehuantepec" (1935), completes the ironic slippage the bourgeois left
has taken as the purpose of post-al theory—the troping of concepts as
puncepts. The image on the poster is of peasants performing a (folk)
dance and the caption reads "The Party's Not Over." The transcoding of
the Party of the proletariat to the party of folk-dancers is the
transcoding of revolution to reform that Zizek's "orthodox marxism"
performs.
The idea is that social inequality is an effect of the
persistence of cultural rituals that need to be addressed separately
from class exploitation and revaluated from within as cultures of
resistance. The "folk"-sy theme accommodates the populist
romanticization of people on the neomarxist Thompsonite left (Smith,
Sprinker) as well, where class is reduced to the "lived experience" of
traditions of "resistance" which say good-bye to the urban working class
as a revolutionary agency that critiques all conventions. The flexodox
left wants a party-ing proletariat (Hennessy), rather than a Party of
the proletariat, to put a smile-y face on exploitation.
The hollowing out of Marxism in the name of (orthodox)
Marxism by such theorists as Smith, Sprinker and Zizek is based on the
ideological un-said of the bourgeois right of property and its
underpinning logic of the market which are represented as natural
("inalienable") "human rights," or more commonly, in daily practices, as
individual rights. Revolutionary struggles against these "rights" (of
property) are assumed to be signs of dogmatism, ruthless impersonality,
vanguardism and totalitarianism—all "obvious" markers of Orthodox
Marxism. The remedy put forward by these theorists is to resist the
revolutionary vanguard in the name of "democracy from below," which is
itself a code phrase for "spontaneity." Spontaneity—the kind of supposed
"freedom" which is the fabric of bourgeois daily life—is itself a
layered notion that, in its folds, hides a sentimentalism that in
reality constitutes "democracy from below" and its allied notion of the
"individual," and the "human subject." Zizek and other "high theorists"
manage to conceal this naïve emotionalism (of which soap operas are
made) in the rather abstract language of "theory." What is subtly
implicit in the discourses of "high theory," however, becomes explicit
in the annotations of middle theory—that is, in bourgeois cultural
commentary and criticism. Rosemary Hennessy's Profit and Pleasure
is the most recent and perhaps most popular attack on Orthodox Marxism
in the name of Marxism itself. Instead of looking at the cultural
commentary in Hennessy's book (the book is actually a reprinting of
older essays, and is thus even more historically significant as a
documentary record of the continual emptying of Marxism in the 1980's
and 1990's), I will look at its "Acknowledgments." This text is not
something "personal" and "separate" from the cultural commentary and
criticism of the essays in the body of her book. The "Acknowledgments"
text represents in fact a summing up—and a mutual confirmation between
Hennessy and those she "acknowledges"—of the core assumptions and ideas
that inform the practices of the bourgeois left now.
As the "Acknowledgments" text makes clear, the cultural
commentary of Hennessy's Profit and Pleasure is rooted in the
notion that politics is basically a community activity. In bourgeois
cultural criticism, the idea of "community activity" is a code term that
signals the substitution of shared "ideas," "assumptions," and
"emotions" for "class" solidarity (Rorty). What, therefore, lies at the
core of "community" is not a structure (class) but a "feeling"
(emotional intensity). Hennessy, who is not as subtle as Zizek or even
Smith, is quite open about the valorization of "feeling" ("opened her
heart" [xii], "feisty politics" [xii], "precious friendship" [xiii], "a
path with heart" [xiii], "warmth and love" [xiii]). The mark of
membership in her post-al community is "heartache": in this evaluative
social scheme, she who has felt the most "heartache" (emotional
intensity) is the most authentic member of the community. This appeal to
a "comradeship" based on the intensity of "feeling" clearly indicates
that no matter what Marxist or quasi-Marxist language Hennessy uses
elsewhere in her book, she basically believes that people's lives are
changed not by revolutionary praxis but by encountering other "feeling"
people: "During the last year of writing this book, I met . . . and my
life has not been the same since . . . " (xiii). The
lesson of this encounter, Hennessy indicates, was not the classic
lessons of Marxism that social change is a product of structural change,
but that social change comes about by means of something called
"revolutionary love" ("amor revolutionario," xiii)
which—according to her—has taken her "time and again to the other side"
("llevarme una y otra vez al otro lado," xiii). The other lesson
is the danger of vanguardism: "revolutionary love" has also reminded her
that "power is finally and always in the hands of the people" ("el
poder es finalmente y siempre en los manos de la gente," xiii).
People as spontaneous actors.
On this view, Orthodox Marxism is dogmatic and
totalitarian. So to "correct" its "faults," Hennessy empties its
revolutionary vanguard of its commitment and puts feeling (manifested by
"heartache") in its place. What is, of course, so significant is that
Hennessy installs such sentimentality as the ultimate layer of her
Marxism in the name of Marxism itself. This is what makes the work of
bourgeois writers like Zizek, Smith, Sprinker and Hennessy effective and
welcome in the academy and the culture industry: they do not (like
regular right-wingers) attack Marxism but they reduce its explanatory
power and its revolutionary force by substituting spontaneity for
revolutionary praxis. For these writers social transformation is the
effect not of revolutionary praxis but of a spontaneous and emotionally
intense exchange between two kindred "spirits." It is the spirit that
moves the world. What in Hennessy is presented as Marxism or feminism
turns out to be a souped-up version of the old bourgeois cultural
feminism which, running away from revolution, retreats once again into
community, spontaneity, affectivity, and above all the autonomous
subject who gives and receives love above and beyond all social and
economic processes.
One of the ways such writers hollow out Marxism of its
Marxism and produce a Marxism beyond Marxism is by their overt
acknowledgement of the way Marxism is treated in the bourgeois culture
industry. Hennessy, for example, writes that Marxism in English
Departments (the trope of the culture industry) is both "courted and
tamed" (2). In other words, by announcing her awareness of the way that
Marxism is tamed, she hopes to inoculate herself from the charge that
she is doing so. The message the reader is supposed to get is this:
because she knows Marxism is always being "tamed," she herself would
never do that. Under cover of this ideological self-inoculation,
Hennessy then goes on to produce her "tamed" version of Marxism that is
only metaphorically "marxist" because it is void of all the concepts and
practices that make Marxism Marxism.
My larger point is of course that the most effective
writings for the ruling class are located in the middle register, in
that register of writing usually praised as lucid, clear, jargon-free
and above all "readable." Zizek is abstract; Hennessy is concrete. This
is another way of saying that the work of Hennessy and other such
"tamers" of Marxism is always a work of synthesis and consolidation—they
make concrete the work of high theory: it is for this reason that their
work forms the very center of the culture industry. Finally, to be
clear, the question here is not to play a game of determining the "good"
from the "bad" Marxism. What is good Marxism—what is effective in
overcoming inequality—is determined by history itself. The question is
whether what is being done actualizes the historical potential made
possible by the development of the forces of production and thus brings
about change in the existing social relations of production (overcomes
class inequality) or whether it plays within the existing actuality and
thus turns the limits of the actually existing into the very limits of
reality as such. And in doing so, reifies the present social relations
of production. Flexodox Marxists like Hennessy accept the proposition
that capitalism is here to stay and thus reject as "impractical" any
pressure put on the external supports of capitalism (capital and labor
relations) and then work within capitalism—on the basis of community and
emotional intensity—to make its ongoing process of the exploitation of
the labor of the world's workers more "humane" and tolerable.
Capitalism is, according to Hennessy's soap-operatic
leftism, something that one should always keep in mind but not seriously
consider overthrowing. She is too cynical to take even her own views
seriously: "This means that eliminating the social structures of
exploitation that capitalism absolutely requires and so violently enacts
at the expense of human needs must be on the political agenda, at the
every least as the horizon that sets the terms for imagining change"
(232). Capitalist exploitation is a heuristic consideration not a
revolutionary imperative. Beyond the theatrical moves of the bourgeois
left, however, Orthodox Marxism is emerging as the only understanding of
the new global formations that lead to transformative praxis. Orthodox
Marxism has become impossible to ignore because the objective
possibility of transforming the regime of wage-labor into a system in
which the priority is not profit but meeting the needs of all is
confronted as a daily actuality. The flexodox left turns the emergent
class struggles into self-enclosed struggles for symbolic power so to
represent class hegemony in the relations of production as capable of
being changed through cross-class "coalitions" when in fact exploitation
is everywhere in the world maintained by such coalitions which are
loosing their legitimacy and breaking apart under the weight of their
own contradictions precisely because the class divide is growing under
their rule and beyond their borders. Orthodox Marxism demonstrates that
the productive forces of capitalism have reached tremendous levels and
have the ability to feed, clothe, and house the world many times over
but are fettered by capitalism's existing social relations: its
fundamental drive to privately consume the social resources of
collective labor. That the left today has, in dramatic fashion, been
forced to return (if only rhetorically) to Orthodox Marxism marks the
fact that the struggle to transform capitalism has reached a stage of
development that necessitates a systemic theoretical basis for
revolutionary praxis. The hegemonic left now wants to incorporate
Orthodox Marxism into its dogmatic coalitional logic as a discourse
which depends for its identity on "class" as "real": which is a code for
the "lived experience" or the transcendental ineffable politics (Lacan)
of class as an outside inferred from the inside (the side of subjective
"values") and as such held to be unavailable for positive knowing. Which
is another way of saying that class is a matter of "persuasion" and
"seduction" rather than production. What the resulting flexodox marxism
cannot explain therefore is that class
is not a matter of what this or
that proletarian or even the proletariat as a whole pictures as
its goal. It is a matter of what the proletariat is in actuality
and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be
compelled to do (Marx-Engels Reader 135).
Orthodox Marxism does not consist of raising "class" as
a dogmatic banner of the "real," but in the critique of false
consciousness that divides the workers by occulting their collective
interest by shifting the focus from their position in social production,
their material antagonism with the capitalist class. "Class as
real" (a spectral agency) cannot explain, and therefore cannot engage
in, the material process through which capitalism, by its very own laws
of motion, produces its own "gravedigger" in the global proletariat.
What the flexodox return to and hollowing out of the concepts of
Orthodox Marxism proves, among other things, is that "the ideas of the
ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas" (Marx and Engels,
The German Ideology 67) and history progresses despite this
ideological hegemony through the agency of labor. In short—"The history
of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
Four
Without Revolutionary Theory There Can Be No
Revolutionary Movement
Orthodox Marxism has become a test-case of the "radical"
today. Yet, what passes for orthodoxy on the left—whether like Smith and
Zizek they claim to support it, or, like Butler and Rorty they want to
"achieve our country" by excluding it from "U.S. Intellectual life" ("On
Left Conservatism"), is a parody of orthodoxy which hybridizes
its central concepts and renders them into flexodox simulations. Yet,
even in its very textuality, however, the orthodox is a resistance to
the flexodox. Contrary to the common-sensical view of "orthodox" as
"traditional" or "conformist" "opinions," is its other meaning:
ortho-doxy not as flexodox "hybridity," but as "original" "ideas."
"Original," not in the sense of epistemic "event," "authorial"
originality and so forth, but, as in chemistry, in its opposition to "para,"
"meta," "post" and other ludic hybridities: thus "ortho" as resistance
to the annotations that mystify the original ideas of Marxism
and hybridize it for the "special interests" of various groups.
The "original" ideas of Marxism are inseparable from
their effect as "demystification" of ideology—for example the deployment
of "class" that allows a demystification of daily life from the haze of
consumption. Class is thus an "original idea" of Marxism in the
sense that it cuts through the hype of cultural agency under capitalism
and reveals how culture and consumption are tied to labor, the
everyday determined by the workday: how the amount of time workers spend
engaging in surplus-labor determines the amount of time they get for
reproducing and cultivating their needs. Without changing this division
of labor social change is impossible. Orthodoxy is a rejection of the
ideological annotations: hence, on the one hand, the resistance to
orthodoxy as "rigid" and "dogmatic" "determinism," and, on the other,
its hybridization by the flexodox as the result of which it has become
almost impossible today to read the original ideas of Marxism,
such as "exploitation"; "surplus-value"; "class"; "class antagonism";
"class struggle"; "revolution"; "science" (i.e., objective knowledge);
"ideology" (as "false consciousness"). Yet, it is these ideas alone
that clarify the elemental truths through which theory ceases
to be a gray activism of tropes, desire and affect, and becomes,
instead, a red, revolutionary guide to praxis for a new society freed
from exploitation and injustice.
Marx's original scientific discovery was his labor
theory of value. Marx's labor theory of value is an elemental truth of
Orthodox Marxism that is rejected by the flexodox left as the central
dogmatism of a "totalitarian" Marxism. It is only Marx's labor theory of
value, however, that exposes the mystification of the wages system that
disguises exploitation as a "fair exchange" between capital and labor
and reveals the truth about this relation as one of exploitation. Only
Orthodox Marxism explains how what the workers sell to the capitalist is
not labor, a commodity like any other whose price is determined by
fluctuations in supply and demand, but their labor-power—their ability
to labor in a system which has systematically "freed" them from the
means of production so they are forced to work or starve—whose value is
determined by the amount of time socially necessary to reproduce it
daily. The value of labor-power is equivalent to the value of wages
workers consume daily in the form of commodities that keep them alive to
be exploited tomorrow. Given the technical composition of production
today this amount of time is a slight fraction of the workday the
majority of which workers spend producing surplus-value over and above
their needs. The surplus-value is what is pocketed by the capitalists in
the form of profit when the commodities are sold. Class is the
antagonistic division thus established between the exploited and their
exploiters. Without Marx's labor theory of value one could only contest
the after effects of this outright theft of social labor-power rather
than its cause lying in the private ownership of production. The
flexodox rejection of the labor theory of value as the "dogmatic" core
of a totalitarian Marxism therefore is a not so subtle rejection of the
principled defense of the (scientific) knowledge workers need for their
emancipation from exploitation because only the labor theory of value
exposes the opportunism of knowledges (ideology) that occult this
exploitation. Without the labor theory of value socialism would only be
a moral dogma that appeals to the sentiments of "fairness" and
"equality" for a "just" distribution of the social wealth that does the
work of capital by naturalizing the exploitation of labor under
capitalism giving it an acceptable "human face."
It is only Orthodox Marxism that explains socialism as
an historical inevitability that is tied to the development of social
production itself and its requirements. Orthodox Marxism makes socialism
scientific because it explains how in the capitalist system, based on
the private consumption of labor-power (competition), the objective
tendency is to reduce the amount of time labor spends in reproducing
itself (necessary labor) while expanding the amount of time labor is
engaged in producing surplus-value (surplus-labor) for the capitalist
through the introduction of machinery into the production process by the
capitalists themselves to lower their own labor costs. Because of the
competitive drive for profits under capitalism it is historically
inevitable that a point is reached when the technical mastery—the
amount of time socially necessary on average to meet the needs of
society through the processing of natural resources—is such that the
conditions of the workers worsen relative to the owners and becomes an
unbearable global social contradiction in the midst of the ever greater
mass of wealth produced. It is therefore just as inevitable that at such
a moment it obviously makes more sense to socialize production and meet
the needs of all to avoid the explosive social conflicts perpetually
generated by private property than to maintain the system at the risk of
total social collapse on a world scale. "Socialism or barbarism"
(Luxemburg) is the inevitable choice faced by humanity because of
capitalism. Either maintain private property and the exploitation of
labor in production, in which case more and more social resources will
go into policing the growingly desperate surplus-population generated by
the technical efficiency of social production, or socialize production
and inaugurate a society whose founding principle is "from each
according to his ability, to each according to his needs" (Marx,
Critique of the Gotha Program, Selected Works, 325) and "in
which the free development of each is the condition for the free
development of all" (Manifesto of the Communist Party,
Selected Works, 53).
The time has come to state it clearly so that even the
flexodox opportunists may grasp it: Orthodox Marxism is not a
free-floating "language-game" or "meta-narrative" for arbitrarily
constructing local utopian communities or spectral activist inversions
of ideology meant to seduce "desire" and "mobilize" (glorify)
subjectivity—it is an absolute prerequisite for our emancipation from
exploitation and a new society freed from necessity! Orthodox Marxism is
the only global theory of social change. Only Orthodox Marxism has
explained why under the system of wage-labor and capital communism is
not "an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself" but "the
real movement which abolishes the present state of things" (The
German Ideology 57) because of its objective explanation of and
ceaseless commitment to "the self-conscious, independent movement of the
immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority" (Manifesto
of the Communist Party, Selected Works, 45) to end social
inequality forever.
Works Cited:
Butler, Judith. "Merely Cultural." Social Text
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Hennessy, Rosemary. Profit and Pleasure: Sexual
Identities in Late Capitalism. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Lenin, V. I. "Liberal and Marxist Conceptions of the
Class Struggle." V. I. Lenin Collected Works. Vol. 19. Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1977. 119-24.
_____. Wage-Labour and Capital/Value, Price and Profit.
New York: International Publishers, 1990.
_____. and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1976.
_____. and Frederick Engels. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed.
Robert C. Tucker. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978.
Negri, Antonio and Michael Hardt. Empire.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Rorty, Richard. "Solidarity or Objectivity?"
Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991. 21-34.
Smith, Paul. Millennial Dreams. New York: Verso,
1997.
Sprinker, Michael. "Forum on Teaching Marxism."
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Žižek, Slavoj. "Preface: Burning The Bridges." The
Žižek Reader. Ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1999. vii-x.
_____. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political
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