review essay: (mis-)reading/(re-)reading marx

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Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 24, No. 1, 2001 Review Essay (Mis-)Reading/(Re-)Reading Marx Martha E. Gimenez Marxism and Social Science. By Gamble, Andrew, David Marsh, and Tony Tant. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. 381 pages, paperback, ISBN: 0252068165. The demise of “actually existing socialism” followed by the swift and relent- less globalization of capitalism have compelled Marxist scholars and activists to re-examine the relevance of Marx’s work and of the Marxist tradition. Is Marxism obsolete? Is it unthinkable to conceive of alternatives to capitalism? Have we arrived at the end of history? What will be the fate of the Marxist tradition? Is the “free market” the only workable foundation for democracy? Are class divi- sions ineradicable? Could Marxism survive, as an intellectual tradition and as the basis for progressive politics, if socialism were viewed as an undesirable alterna- tive? The purpose of this collection of essays is to offer some answers to those and many other questions while exploring the weaknesses and strengths of the Marxist tradition, its response to the challenges from the new right, feminism, regulation theory, and postmodernism, its scientific claims, and its usefulness in analyzing substantive issues such as globalization, ecology, class, the state, and culture. The power of Marx’s method and theory of capitalism, and the extraordinary richness of the Marxist tradition, shine through this collection of mostly critical essays; together they amply demonstrate that any serious engagement with today’s crucial theoretical and political issues necessitates a return to Marx and to Marxism. Today, as was true one hundred years ago, there are no social science perspectives and no political standpoints which haven’t developed through an acknowledged or unacknowledged dialogue with Marx. Most of these essays, therefore, give the readers a fairly good sense of Marxist, neo-Marxist and non-Marxist analyses of substantive issues, identifying the strengths and perceived limitations of Marxism Correspondence should be directed to Martha E. Gimenez, Department of Sociology, Campus Box 327, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309; e-mail: [email protected]. 145 C 2001 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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Qualitative Sociology [quso] PH007-291975 December 23, 2000 13:13 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 24, No. 1, 2001

Review Essay

(Mis-)Reading/(Re-)Reading Marx

Martha E. Gimenez

Marxism and Social Science.By Gamble, Andrew, David Marsh, and Tony Tant.Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. 381 pages, paperback,ISBN: 0252068165.

The demise of “actually existing socialism” followed by the swift and relent-less globalization of capitalism have compelled Marxist scholars and activists tore-examine the relevance of Marx’s work and of the Marxist tradition. Is Marxismobsolete? Is it unthinkable to conceive of alternatives to capitalism? Have wearrived at the end of history? What will be the fate of the Marxist tradition? Isthe “free market” the only workable foundation for democracy? Are class divi-sions ineradicable? Could Marxism survive, as an intellectual tradition and as thebasis for progressive politics, if socialism were viewed as an undesirable alterna-tive? The purpose of this collection of essays is to offer some answers to thoseand many other questions while exploring the weaknesses and strengths of theMarxist tradition, its response to the challenges from the new right, feminism,regulation theory, and postmodernism, its scientific claims, and its usefulness inanalyzing substantive issues such as globalization, ecology, class, the state, andculture.

The power of Marx’s method and theory of capitalism, and the extraordinaryrichness of the Marxist tradition, shine through this collection of mostly criticalessays; together they amply demonstrate that any serious engagement with today’scrucial theoretical and political issues necessitates a return to Marx and to Marxism.Today, as was true one hundred years ago, there are no social science perspectivesand no political standpoints which haven’t developed through an acknowledgedor unacknowledged dialogue with Marx. Most of these essays, therefore, give thereaders a fairly good sense of Marxist, neo-Marxist and non-Marxist analyses ofsubstantive issues, identifying the strengths and perceived limitations of Marxism

Correspondence should be directed to Martha E. Gimenez, Department of Sociology, Campus Box 327,University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309; e-mail: [email protected].

145

C© 2001 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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as well as the various ways through which contemporary scholars have soughtto transcend those problems. Sometimes this critical reassessment leads to therejection of Marx’s basic theoretical and methodological assumptions, resultingin a version of Marxism unacceptable to knowledgeable Marxists, as exempli-fied in the chapter describing Marxism’s encounter with postmodernism. Thischapter is mainly anexegesis of Laclau and Mouffe’s work, which is presentedas a needed corrective to the “economism” of classical Marxism. While there isreference to some critics of their work and of postmodernism in general (othersjust as important, such as Wood [1986], Epstein [1995], and Zavarzadeh, Ebert,and Morton [1995] are not mentioned), their arguments are not given the con-sideration they deserve. The postmodern alternative to “economism” is, however,discourse determinism (i.e., there is nothing outside discourse; everything is dis-cursively constructed) and a politics of contingency, with no “privileged historicalidentities” (meaning the working class has no pivotal role in the struggles for humanemancipation), and no preconceived political objectives (i.e., socialism) nor anyend to political struggles, for “power and antagonisms can never be eliminated”(Daly 1999, p. 80). Postmodern “Marxism,” then, assumes the impossibility ofqualitative social change leading to egalitarian social relations; having denied the“extra-discursive” reality or materiality of the mode of production and its causalefficacy and the systemic nature of global capitalism, it reduces the political ter-rain to “a proliferation of the sites of antagonism that go way beyond traditionalquestions of how we produce or consume” (ibid., p. 81).

The realities of the “extra-discursive” (e.g., the exploitation of labor, the ex-ploitation of nature, and male domination), however, necessitate the analysis of thematerial conditions that affect people’s lives. The effects upon women of the orga-nization of human reproduction and its articulation with the mode of productionhas resulted in a resurgence of materialist feminism, concerned with the materialdimensions of the oppression of women as exploited workers and battered women.This is a feminism that combines postmodern sensibilities about culture with thematerial realities of capitalism, patriarchy, and other real or material structures ofoppression (Jackson 1999). Awareness of the exploitation of nature and its eco-logical and human negative effects has led to a reexamination of Marx’s theory ofcapital accumulation and its contradictions, the conceptualization of the contra-diction between capitalism and the material conditions of production, and a returnto Marx’s work in an effort to recover his ecologically relevant theoretical insights(Barry 1999; see also Burkett 1999, Foster 2000). And, in the not so distant future,as the growing widespread criticism of the WTO, World Bank, IMF, and neo-liberaleconomic policies suggests, the intensification of the exploitation of labor world-wide and drastic increase in economic inequality are likely to trigger a return tothe now discredited theoretical and political insights of historical materialism. AsBromley points out, Marx can be rightfully considered “the first major theorist ofglobalization.” Without denying the importance of recent theoretical developments

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and the new lines of inquiry they open up, “all rest on an unacknowledged startingpoint: Marx’s” (Bromley 1999, p. 280).

I have entitled this review “(Mis-)Reading Marx” because, underlying mostof the “corrections” and “improvements” on Marxism presented in these essays,there is an impoverished, functionalist, empiricist, undialectical reading of Marxaccording to which his work is flawed by an economism, structuralism, and de-terminism which have to be rejected if Marxism is to retain credibility (Marsh1999). There is some recognition that those objectionable features are specific tothe Marxism of the Second International and Soviet Marxism. However, many ofthe essays blur distinctions, so that in the end all of classical Marxism, includingMarx, is tainted by these “isms.” Taken in isolation, some of Marx’s statementscan be interpreted as instances of “economism”; but his work as a whole, if readin light of his theoretical and methodological assumptions, is far more subtle andcomplex than many critics today seem to be willing to acknowledge.

As Tant (1999) points out, Marxism is incompatible with empiricist modelsof science, but congruent with the realist and practical materialist conceptions ofscience. For Marx, as for the realist philosophy of science, the goal of scienceis to go beyond the appearances and ascertain the underlying causal relationsor mechanisms that produce those appearances or observable phenomena andour experience of those phenomena. Marx’s insistence on the dialectical natureof reality is congruent with modern chaos theories and theories of complexity(Tant, 1999). But Marx’s stratified conception of social reality, which differentiatesbetween the level of analysis of observable phenomena (the level of analysis ofsocial formations, social institutions, and the “very Eden of the innate rights ofman. . .Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” [Marx 1967a, p. 170]) and thelevel of analysis of the causal mechanisms that produce observable phenomena(the level of the capitalist mode of production, its structures, processes, tendencies,and contradictions) is ignored by most critics. Severing the dialectical connectionbetween appearances and their conditions of possibility, between structure andagency, between the mode of production and the ideological forms in which peoplebecome aware of their conditions of existence (Marx 1970, p. 21), modern theoriststend to embrace abstract negations of whatever aspect of historical materialismthey dislike the most. They “privilege” agency over structure, “signifiers. . .oversignified. . . form over content, appearance over essence, particular over universaland consumption over production” (McMahon 1999). To these critics we canstill apply Marx’s answer to those who criticized his arguments in the Prefaceto the Critique of Political Economy (Marx 1970, pp. 19–23) by bringing up theimportance of politics in Rome and Athens, and of Catholicism in the MiddleAges:

This much, however, is clear, that the middle ages could not live on Catholicism, nor theancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which they gained a livelihood thatexplains why here politics, and there Catholicism, played the chief part (Marx 1967a, p. 62).

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And, while the theory of the mode of production and the specific formsin which surplus is extracted “reveals the innermost secret” of entire social andpolitical structures and relations,

this does not prevent the same economic basis—the same from the standpoint of its mainconditions—due to innumerable different, empirical historical influences, etc., from show-ing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by anal-ysis of the empirically given circumstances (Marx 1967b, pp. 791–793; emphasis added).

To a large extent, the alternatives to classical Marxism proposed in these es-says take those “infinite variations and gradations in appearance” as evidence ofthe shortcomings of historical materialism and as the basis for alternative (and, byimplication, “better,” meaning non-economistic, etc.) theoretical constructs suchas “historical blocs” (Daly 1999, p. 69) or “regimes of accumulation” and “modesof social regulation” (Kenny 1999). Hence, the theoretical polarity underlyingthese essays undialectically “privileges” agency, politics, contingency, and formsof structured inequality other than class (Marsh 1999, p. 322). This is why thisvolume, while offering a spirited, albeit critical, defense of the Marxist traditionin the form of an interesting, scholarly presentation of the ways it has enrichedand continues to energize the social sciences, might also have the unintended ef-fect of reinforcing stereotypical understandings of Marx and Marxism. In the lastchapter, Marsh offers a balanced settling of accounts, which highlights the needfor a dialectical understanding of Marx’s admittedly complex and contradictorywork. It is interesting and very revealing that, in the last pages of a book which,in each chapter, inveighs against “economism,” we find the arguments put forth todefend the continued relevance of Marx and Marxism resting solidly upon theirtheoretical and political contributions to the analysis and critique of capitalism andits contradictions, leading to periodic crises and ever deepening levels of struc-tured inequality, which are the “key feature of modern society at both the nationaland international level” (p. 340). This is a challenging volume, an important inter-vention at the level of ideological and political struggles, useful for research andteaching—a welcome addition to Marxist scholarship.

REFERENCES

Barry, J. (1999). Marxism and ecology. In A. Gamble, D. Marsh, & T. Tant,Marxism and social science(pp. 259–279). Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Bromley, S. (1999). Marxism and globalization. In A. Gamble et al., op cit. (pp. 280–301).Burkett, P. (1999).Marx and nature: A red and green perspective. New York: St. Martin’s Press.Daly, G. (1999). Marxism and postmodernity. In A. Gamble et al., op cit. (pp. 61–84).Epstein, B. (1995). Why poststructuralism is a dead end for progressive thought.Socialist Review, 5,

83–119.Foster, J. B. (2000).Marx’s ecology: Materialism and nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.Jackson, S. (1999). Marxism and feminism. In A. Gamble et al., op. cit. (pp. 11–34).Kenny, M. (1999). Marxism and Regulation Theory. In A. Gamble et al, op. cit. (pp. 35–60).Marsh, D. (1999). Resurrecting Marxism. In A. Gamble et al., op. cit. (pp. 320–340).Marx, K. (1967a).Capital, vol. I. New York: International Publishers.

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Marx, K. (1967b).Capital, vol. III. New York: International Publishers.Marx, K. (1970).A contribution to the critique of political economy. New York: International Publishers.McMahon, C. (1999). Marxism and Culture. In A. Gamble et al, op. cit. (pp. 195–216).Tant, T. (1999). Marxism as Social Science. In A. Gamble et al, op. cit. (pp. 104–125).Wood, E. M. (1986).The retreat from class: A new “true” socialism. London: Verso.Zavarzadeh, M., Ebert, T. L., & Morton, D. (Eds.) (1995).Post-ality: Marxism and postmodernism.

Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press.