5
Mark Laffey and Kathryn Dean1
How is the revolutionary subject to be tensed and spaced out, centered and decentered, sober and drunk, German and French, at one and the same time?
(Eagleton 1988: ix)
a friend told me recently that the late Chris Hani of South Africa’s Communist Party once laughingly informed her that he had been too busy working on revolution to read Das Kapital…
(Lam 1996: 263, n.4)
‘Workers of the World _____!’
(Hitchcock 1996: 71)
We are living in a Marxist moment. The internationalization of capital, so central to the rhetoric and reality of globalization, has prompted a renewed interest in historical materialism. This interest takes the form of a return to economistic Marxism, as the continuing necessity of Marxism is justified in terms of its superior capacity to analyse capitalism. This economism arises from the conceptualization of capitalism as an ‘economy’, rather than as a complete way of life, the purpose of historical materialism being the study of this ‘economy’ (e.g. Gamble 1999: 142–4). This return to economistic historical materialism diminishes Marxism’s critical potential. This is because, first, it reproduces the economistic logic of capitalism itself. Second, it ignores, or treats as epiphenomenal, the matter of subjectivity. This neglect of subjectivity is a neglect of the question of agency (e.g. Castree 1995a: 269). Third, it risks blindness to the truly radical character of globalization as a multiplicity of processes, which set the capitalist economizing logic against myriad cultural differences. An understanding of this new conjuncture demands an expansion of Marxist horizons beyond European parochialism (e.g. Chakrabarty 1996: 55). In short, the critical power of historical materialism is undercut by its economism, which results in the neglect of subjectivity, and an inability to theorize the issues of identity and difference fore-grounded by globalization.
A Marxism adequate for the twenty-first century must correct these deficiencies if it is to provide the means to articulate new visions of possible futures and ways to achieve them (e.g. Smith 1996). It must, to paraphrase Raymond Williams (1989), provide resources of hope. In this chapter, we argue that a Marxism adequate to a moment in which the putative subject of Marxism has never been more ‘decentered’ and ‘spaced out’ (Eagleton 1988: ix) cannot emerge out of a return to an economistic historical materialism. As an imperfect name for a differential and uneven process of transition from an international economy to an imaginary unified global economy “globalisation” is a flexible concept for flexible times …’ (Herod et al. 1998: 2). What we need is a flexible Marxism for flexible times. Minimally, this requires plausible accounts of subjectivity and the economy. We find resources for such a reworking of historical materialism in the disputed legacy of Louis Althusser. In attempting to transcend the simple analysis of causality implied in the base/superstructure metaphor, Althusser provides the theoretical raw materials for eliminating economism and for strengthening the critical dimension of historical materialism. He also offers Marxists a non-reductive way of understanding cultural diversity, and of the ways in which capitalism itself may serve to intensify, rather than eliminate, such diversity.
The chapter is organized as follows. First, we chart the return to historical materialism in the context of globalization and show how that return works against historical materialism’s claim to be a critical theory. Second, we trace this return to a particular understanding of Western Marxism, of Althusser and his influence, and argue that this understanding is mistaken. On the contrary, addressing the lacunae evident in the return to Marxism with respect to its account of subjectivity and the economy requires a return to Althusser and his legacies in contemporary social and political thought. Ours is not a post-Marxist position but the defence of a Marxism different from that of the emergent orthodoxy. Third, we offer a re-reading of Althusser’s work, showing where and how it opens up issues and questions closed down or ignored in more recent scholarship and offers ways forward. In a short conclusion, we reflect on the broader implications of our argument for the politics of theory and the making of new worlds.
Globalization and the return of which Marxism?
The collapse of really existing socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the continuing rhetoric and reality of globalization have together breathed new life into historical materialism. Globalization is good for historical materialism. No longer caught in the middle of Cold War ideological and superpower struggle and faced with the seeming triumph of capital in achieving for the first time a truly global reach (Smith 1997), the relevance of Marxism to our historical moment is widely asserted. Against efforts to link Marxism to the failed Soviet and East European regimes, thereby to consign all three to the dustbin of history, the demise of really existing socialism is transformed instead into the liberation of historical materialism. Thus Fredric Jameson asserts that ‘it does not seem to make much sense to talk about the bankruptcy of Marxism, when Marxism is precisely the science and the study of just that capitalism whose global triumph is affirmed in talk of Marxism’s demise’ (1991a: 255). Historical materialism and capitalism are on this view bound tightly together: Marxism is defined by its ‘allegiance to a specific complex of problems, whose formulations are always in movement and in historic rearrangement and restructuration, along with their object of study’, capitalism itself (Jameson 1996: 19). So long as we have capitalism, then, we must have Marxism.
While we accept that Marxism is, above all, the critical science of capitalism, we want to reject, in the name of a truly critical theory, the reduction of that science to political economy. We want to reject the assumption that the persistence of capitalism implies ‘business as usual’, if that assumption means a return to an unreconstructed economism. Such an assumption ‘is complacent and hopelessly inadequate’ (Sayer 1995: 13).2 It is hopelessly inadequate in that it fails to take seriously, not only the real historicity of capitalism itself – the different modes in which it appears under different spatio-temporal conditions (Albritton 1991) – but also the persistence of non-capitalist forms of life and the likelihood of the emergence, out of the latter, of forms of resistance not reducible to the European categories which are Marxism’s legacy (e.g. Jameson and Miyoshi 1998; Lowe and Lloyd 1997a).
This raises the question: which Marxism? Historical materialism has always been a diverse tradition of theory and practice. There is no such thing as Marxism, there are only Marxisms: ‘as a category “Marxism” is, in fact, no better than a gnomic vulgarity’ (Castree 1995b: 1163; Carver 1998). The existence of multiple Marxisms forces us to choose among them. In making our choice, we need to be sensitive to the contextual character of all theorizing and to correct for specific contextual effects that may render our theory misleading when directed towards changing and context-specific objects of study. Marxisms are unavoidably shaped by the circumstances of their production, and incorporate specific features of the world in which Marxist theorists are situated. This is itself a Marxian point to which Marxists are sometimes insufficiently attentive. They are also sometimes insufficiently attentive to the historicity of capitalist forms of life mentioned above. As capitalism itself changes in some key respects (as in, for instance, changes in means and objects of production as traced by Albritton 1991), so, too, must our theorizing change. We cannot simply recycle past historical materialisms and assume they will be adequate to our historical moment and to capitalism in our time (Sivanandran 1998/9: 7–8). Moreover, if we understand historical materialism as a critical theory, then we must look for a Marxism that is attentive to questions of subjectivity and agency. In their neglect of such questions, economistic conceptions of capital are both cognitively inadequate and politically impoverishing; they impoverish the political imagination and induce pessimism and feelings of hopelessness (Gibson-Graham 1996: 251–65 and passim). The answers to our two questions thus converge: questions of conceptual and theoretical adequacy are directly relevant to questions of political agency. The kind of Marxism we embrace now will shape our capacity to remake our futures Jameson 2000). As we will show, the form of the most recent return to historical materialism undermines its claim to be a critical theory.
The return to Marxism in the context of globalization takes a variety of forms, as the other contributions to this volume demonstrate. But in its most prominent and widely praised articulations, it has two distinguishing features. First, Marxism is defined as an economism: it provides a ‘crucial set of concepts’ for understanding the capitalist mode of production (Gamble 1999: 142–3). This is the only defensible conception of historical materialism now. Other features of the Marxist heritage such as the labour theory of value – Marxism’s ‘microfoundations’ (142) – are simply implausible, as is the claim to be a total science of society. In the end, argues Gamble, ‘if the primacy of the economic is lost, then Marxism loses its distinctiveness and its value in social theory’ (143). This particular conception of historical materialism has recently been celebrated in the reception of Robert Brenner’s analysis of the world economy (see also Rosenberg 1994).3
This economism renders invisible the theoretical problem of agency. It either assumes the emergency of the appropriate transformative agency, i.e. the homogeneous and revolutionary proletariat, or it retreats into silence on this matter. Unfortunately, even the most sophisticated accounts of capitalism will take us no further forward if they are not accompanied by an understanding of those conditions needed to engender the extraordinary capacities needed for such agency. If we are not to reproduce the authoritarianism of vanguardism, we need to consider the question of capacities at the level of subjectivity or individuation, rather than at that of class. This is not to claim that the concept of class is redundant, but to argue that better accounts of class – accounts which do not merely impose the category on an empirical world on the basis of an examination of the logic of capitalism – require an examination of subjectivity.4
The valorization of an economistic conception of class is accompanied by the vigorous rejection of identity politics, i.e. of politics embodying claims to ‘recognition’ rather than ‘redistribution’. The assertion of class involves giving priority to the emancipatory project of socialism over other forms of oppression such as race or gender (Wood 1995: chap. 9).5 Not only are these forms of identity held to be less politically important than that of class, but the politics of identity and subjectivity is linked directly to postmodernism and liberal individualism (e.g. Wood 1986).
Defining Marxism as an economism means that ‘conflicts that fall “outside” the development of class consciousness are politically subordinate, or constitute “false consciousness”: antagonisms articulated, for example, around gender or race, are seen as effects of [or as secondary to] a more fundamental contradiction’ (Lowe and Lloyd 1997b: 13). But in the context of a putatively global capitalism, this serves to marginalize struggles that do not take class forms. As numerous scholars have documented, the struggles engendered by capitalist relations of production, particularly in the colonial and postcolonial world, most often take cultural forms that are incompatible with European-style proletarianization (ibid.). A Marxism flexible enough to grasp these conflicts and to do so in a materialist and politically progressive manner cannot be built on a Marxist foundation that expresses only a Western and European conception of modernity.
This point is of more general significance. Globalization raises in acute fashion a set of issues located – at least from the point of view of the return to historical materialism – squarely within the superstructure. If we accept that globalization involves the revitalization of capitalism’s attempt to colonize the world, we must at the same time resist: (a) conceptualizing that attempt in ‘economistic’ terms; and (b) assuming that that colonization is bound to be complete and successful. This is a crucial political task if historical materialists are to meet the challenge of arming, organizing, and speaking to and for an increasingly polyglot, feminized and internally differentiated global proletariat.
For many both inside and outside the West, the assertion that capitalism is a form of domination more fundamental than, say, race or gender, and thus that the privileged agent of anti-capitalist struggle is a unified class subject (e.g. Wood 1995: chap. 9; but see Eagleton 1988: vii), is experienced not as liberating but as an imposition and a denial of other forms of subjectivity. Advancing such apparently economistic forms of political agency risks the temptation of inflicting a political violence intended to reduce otherness to sameness.6 If ‘liberating humanity for its own development is to open up the production of difference, even to open up a terrain for contestation within and among differences’, as Harvey (1995: 15) suggests, economism is not the way to liberation. Fortunately, economism is not the only mode of historical materialism available to us.
In order to address these questions, we cannot simply return to being historical materialists in the same old economistic way. Globalization itself forces us to engage with a set of issues central to Western Marxism, namely, the so-called superstructural issues. More accurately, a critical understanding of globalization demands that we distance ourselves from economistic theorizing by rejecting altogether the ‘very simple’ base/superstructure model on which it is grounded.
Significantly, the return to historical materialism has also been articulated through explicit rejections of Althusser and his works, which are criticized as overly structuralist, thereby erasing agency, as Stalinist, and as having opened the way to the excesses of post-structuralism and postmodernism (e.g. Cox with Sinclair 1996: 94–5, 176, 404–5; Wood 1995: 7–9 and passim). These criticisms are the theoretical equivalent of shooting the messenger who brings bad news, since, as Althusser points out, it is capitalism itself which seeks the transformation of subjects into ‘bearers of structures’.7 However, he does not assume the total success of such capitalist projects, as will be seen. To the contrary, his account of causality in complex social formations forbids such assumptions. It is because Althusser is attentive to such matters that his work is rich in the theoretical resources for thinking the complexity, fragmentation and contradiction of our ‘flexible times’. Against much conventional wisdom, we argue that the resources for addressing the issues we have raised above are to be found in the work of Althusser and his legacies.
Rescuing Althusser from his critics
Arguing for the continuing relevance of Althusser’s work to the contemporary analysis of globalization and the articulation of a different, flexible Marxism is no easy task. Across the social sciences, Althusser is almost universally reviled.8 Indeed, rejection of Althusser serves as a touchstone for some of the more prominent schools of thought in the analysis of contemporary world politics and globalization: in the writings of virtually all neo-Gramscian scholars, for example, ‘the specter of Althusserian structural Marxism is raised again …’ (Drainville 1994: 108). In a familiar logic of self and other, a particular reading of Althusser and of structural Marxism more generally serves to define each of these projects. Recent calls for the reinvigoration of historical materialism, both in relation to globalization and more generally,9 take for granted a particular reading of the Althusserian moment and of its broader context, Western Marxism.
According to Perry Anderson, who popularized the term, Western Marxism was a formation that over-emphasized secondary issues such as ideology, philosophy, politics and culture and consequently gave insufficient attention to political economy. This was a Marxism that ignored the base and instead ‘came to concentrate overwhelmingly on study of superstructures’ (Anderson 1976: 75). This superstructural fixation, the product of a political defeat, resulted in
a remarkable range of reflections on different aspects of the culture of modern capitalism. But these were never integrated into a consistent theory of its economic development, typically remaining at a somewhat detached and specialised angle to the broader movement of society: taxable with a certain idealism, from the standpoint of a more classical Marxism.
(Anderson 1998: 72)
Accordingly, Anderson lauds Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism as the ‘most complete consummation’ of Western Marxism because it grounds the ‘cultural logic’ of capital in Ernest Mandel’s account of Late Capitalism (Anderson 1998: 72; Jameson 1991b; Mandel 1975). In contrast to the sophisticated dead-end represented by Western Marxism, the way forward for a historical materialist account of globalization, it appears, is by way of a return to the classical statements of political economy and, in particular, the analysis of imperialism (Anderson 1976: 94 and passim; Bromley 1999; Rosenberg 1996; cf. Harvey 1995: 5).
Anderson’s argument both misunderstands and understates the real achievements of Western Marxism and its contributions to historical materialism, and in particular to political economy. Western Marxism is not only a Marxism of the superstructures. Considerable effort by Althusser and others went into trying to rethink or overcome the base/superstructure dichotomy (Althusser 1984a, 1990a, 1990b).10 This puts in question the organizing device of Anderson’s narrative. Seeing the contributions of Western Marxism as primarily contributions to the analysis of superstructures misconstrues the relations between Althusser’s decentring of economic determinism and the analysis of other ‘levels’ such as the political or the ideological.
Moreover, Anderson’s argument, in common with others who have sought to define themselves against Althusser, depends on a highly questionable reading of Althusser’s project. That reading has a number of characteristic features, none of which is sustainable. First, Althusser’s work is deemed to be in league with, a product of, or liable to culminate in Stalinism. But this reading, which depends on drawing a more or less direct line from political to theoretical practice, is contradicted both by the explicitly anti-Stalinist nature of Althusser’s interventions and by his sustained criticism of just the kind of reduction of theoretical practice to political practice that the charge assumes (Sprinker 1987: 177–9). Althusser’s insistence on the need for Marxists to write ‘a true historical study of the conditions and forms of … consciousness’ (1990a: 105) follows from his analysis of Stalinism, as do also his notes on the requirements for such a study in his essays on socialist humanism and the ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) (Althusser 1984a).
Second, Althusser is accused of offering a functionalist account of both ideology and the state, an account that, whatever its other features, works to undermine the possibility of change, whether revolutionary or otherwise. Here too the criticism relies on misreading Althusser’s work. His essay on the ISAs is a functional, not functionalist, account of capitalism’s conditions of reproduction, one which focuses on the capitalist need to reproduce subjectivities adequate to the reproduction of capitalism itself (Lock 1988; cf. Panitch 1996: 87 on functions and functionalism). However, careful readers of ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ will understand that such reproduction cannot be guaranteed but is inherently open to dysfunctionality and subversion for reasons to be explored below. Indeed, the ISAs are ‘multiple’, ‘distinct’, and ‘relatively autonomous’ sites of ‘the clashes between the capitalist class struggle and the proletarian class struggle’ (Althusser 1984a: 23; Sprinker 1987: 194). Althusser’s account of the ISAs is not an invitation to defeatism and despair but rather a call to arms (Sprinker 1987: 229).11
Third, and most damaging for any work that claims to be a critical theory, Althusser’s historical materialism is accused of being a structuralism, with no place for human agency. This charge, now so widespread as to have become dogma, is the lynchpin of Anderson’s rejection of Althusser and is also central to Wood’s criticisms (Anderson 1983: 39; Wood 1995: chap. 2). However, as Althusser himself noted, in an unusually direct statement of capitalism’s deviancy, it is capitalism that effects (or attempts to effect) this outcome (see Althusser 1990d: 237–8). Understanding this ‘terrible practical reduction’ is a prerequisite for an understanding of the (absence of) potential for heroic transformative collective agency. In any case, Althusser’s development of the materialist dialectic involves the reconceptualization of the structure/agency dichotomy as practice. This broader framework of Althusser’s needs to be kept in mind when reading the ISAs essay, as must his insistence on the distinction between subjects ‘of’ and ‘in’ history. The point is not to eliminate subjectivity or agency, but to understand the historicity of forms of subjectivity and agency.
We have argued that the different understanding of agency and of its conditions of possibility afforded by Althusser’s work is of considerable significance in the context of globalization. But it is also worth noting the tremendous fruitfulness of these ideas in contemporary social theory and in particular its more materialist strands (e.g. Callari et al,. 1995). From this point of view, then, the works of Althusser, and of Western Marxism more generally, should be seen not as a deviation produced by a political defeat, but as a necessary attempt to account for that political defeat in terms of the inadequacies of economism. These works are ‘a threshold behind which we cannot allow ourselves to fall’ (Hall 1985: 97).12
Re-reading Althusser
As we have argued above, the new historical materialism, in common with other positions within the field, emerges partly in response to a specific reading of Althusser, one that we contest. In seeking to reassert the significance of his work for how we understand globalization, then, part of what is at stake is ‘reading for the best Althusser’ (paraphrasing Johnson 1982). It is to that task that we now turn. We focus first on Althusser’s reworking of the base–superstructure metaphor, and, second, his notes on the need for a theory of capitalism and subjectivity.
Beyond the base–superstructure metaphor: or, the materialist dialectic
As noted above, Althusser introduces complexity into Marxist theorizing in the first instance by insisting on: (a) an inclusive, rather than exclusive, concept of mode of production (i.e. by conceptualizing it as a total mode of life rather than as an ‘economy’); and (b) the distinction between mode of production and social formation. A social formation is composed of more than one form of life. Moreover, it is social formations that we find in real, as opposed to theorized, life. Beyond these crucial conceptual distinctions, Althusser rejects the simple model of causality implied in the base-superstructure, in ways that will be discussed below.
The capitalist mode of production in its ‘pure’ form is one marked by economism, which is what marks it off from all other modes of production. It must seek the instantiation of an expressive totality whose constitutive levels are subsumed under the law of value. It must try to ensure that the ‘base’ will get the ‘superstructure’ that its flourishing demands; that evenness – in the sense of smoothly functioning supportive practices in the different levels – rather than unevenness will pertain. However, for Althusser – who, again, was not a functionalist – this is impossible. Because of the character of causality in social wholes, capitalism would be bound to generate ‘unevenness’ rather than ‘expressiveness’ even in the mythical case of an actually existing pure capitalist mode of production. Here unevenness refers to the coexistence of different, possibly contradictory, logics within a unity. So, we can infer that whereas the logic of capitalism is a colonizing logic, the separation of dedicated levels of practices allows of the (at least temporary) escape from that logic. Resistance to (or drift away from) commodification is possible, at least in the short term, and in relation to certain kinds of practices carried on at extra-economic levels. Capitalism must seek to domesticate those differences by subsuming them under the law of value, that is, by ensuring that they function to reproduce capital. One task for a critical theory, then, is to identify and encourage the flourishing of differences which are anti-and/or non-capitalist (see Gibson-Graham 1996), even as it recognizes that capitalism has shown a remarkable ability to, as it were, ‘respect’ non-capitalist social forms while also exploiting them (Lowe and Lloyd 1997b: 15). It cannot be assumed that difference will emerge in one homogeneous anti-capitalist form as a proletarian collective actor and indeed this is not the case. Such an assumption is informed by a simplistic idea of one, clear-cut, system-destroying contradiction between ‘capital’ and ‘labour’. The materialist dialectic warns us of the foolishness of expecting such a beautifully simple negation of the negation.
The concept of totality or social whole directs us towards an expanded conception of mode of production; one which incorporates an internal relations model of causality involving claims about the mutual constitutedness of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’. Moreover, Althusser reminds us that modes of production are not to be found in their pure form; instead, what we find are social formations. This distinction between mode of production and social formation is vital if we are to take into account the possible causal weight of ‘survivals’ (of noncapitalist practices) in a globalizing world (Marx 1981: 172; Althusser 1990a: esp. 106). From this point of view, capitalism’s economizing project is threatened from two directions: from its own contradictory character (which is not merely the ‘simple contradiction’ between capital and labour); and from the persistence of pre-or non-capitalist ‘survivals’ in social formations. If we assume the successful institutionalization of capitalism’s economistic dynamic, we will be guilty of the very functionalism with which Althusser has been charged, and against which he himself theorizes. In short, neither mode of production nor social formation functions as the base–superstructure metaphor suggests. It is not enough, then, to complete Marx’s account of the capitalist ‘base’ through a similarly rigorous and comprehensive account of the ‘superstructure’. But this is precisely what Anderson’s endorsement of Jameson’s account of postmodernism implies (1998: 72). The new historical materialism, insofar as it assumes that phenomenological forms can be derived from property relations (e.g. Tetschke 1998), betrays a similar ‘base-and-superstructure’ logic. We must abandon this disabling metaphor completely and replace it with a framework of concepts capable of capturing the complexity of causality in social wholes.13
Althusser’s contribution to the development of a flexible Marxism builds on his conceptual reworking of the dialectic, in ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’, so as to exclude both idealism (voluntarism) and mechanical materialism (determinism or economism). These binaries are the result of abstracting elements from the social whole (or totality) and reifying the resulting abstractions. Idealism and materialism are abstractions from a totality of human practices that, being human, are necessarily composed of both ideal and material elements. It logically follows that the ‘economy’ is also necessarily composed of ideal and material elements. To conflate the economic and the material is to risk the danger of naturalizing capitalist practices that privilege the economic. Capitalism seeks a world in which the economic ‘determines’ all human practices. It is this culturally novel phenomenon that the base–superstructure seeks to explain, but in a manner which stays uncritically close to its object of study. In contrast to this very simple, or even simplistic, explanatory device, the dialectic involves understanding a mode of differentiation involving the spatio-temporal fragmentation of an original unity into elements that are internally related or mutually constitutive. It is this fragmentation of the mutually constitutive that produces contradictions. Understanding the resulting contradictory totality requires conceptual development beyond the binaries characteristic of liberal social theory; hence Althusser’s rejection of the ‘inversion’ metaphor which remains within a binarized theoretical world, and hence also his stress on the concept of practice. Whereas the base-superstructure metaphor encourages us to think in terms of an external model of causality, the materialist dialectic involves the conceptualization of necessary elements or levels of the social whole as internal relations among practices (see also Ollman 1976, 1993).
By its very nature the base-superstructure metaphor takes on the character of a binary opposition and pushes towards analytic rather than dialectical thought. That is to say, it pushes us towards liberal, rather than historical materialist, modes of thought. What it reveals most clearly is the economism – that is, the political attempt to instantiate economic determinism – that is the identifying characteristic of capitalism. At the same time, however, the metaphor conceals the historico-culturally unprecedented – that is, the culturally deviant – nature of this economism. It distorts by naturalizing the historico-cultural. Expressed in Althusserian terms, economism is a concept in theoretical ideology, in the sense that it expresses the common sense of capitalist culture by representing a constitutive element of capitalist practices in naturalistic, rather than critical, mode (Althusser and Balibar 1970: chap. 4; Althusser 1990b). In doing so, it risks contributing to, not the transformation, but (at worst) the reproduction, or, at best, the reform, of existing social relations. We need to be clear that economism is a capitalist political project, rather than a universal fact of human life. Moreover, it has required state-led cultural transformation for its relative success (cf. Corrigan and Sayer 1985). But, beyond that, the survival of capitalism has required state-led action to save capitalism from itself, or from economism. In addition, as Althusser enables us to understand, even where apparently completed, there will emerge contradictory practices that may become the basis for the subversion of that economism. A brief word about Althusser’s controversial conceptual borrowing from psychoanalysis will be of use at this point.
Contradiction and overdetermination
In seeking an account of causality that would be adequate to the particular complexity of a contradictory totality such as capitalism, Althusser turned to psychoanalysis, in which he found the source of his major theoretical innovation, namely, the concept of overdetermination. Unfortunately he failed to theorize his borrowing, thereby leaving his readers in some confusion, if not outright rejection.14 There is not the space here to go into this matter in any detail. However, the point needs to be made quite forcefully that overdetermination does not mean merely a plurality of causes, as some noted commentators on Althusser have suggested (e.g. Callinicos 1976, 1993). In contrast to multicausality, which suggests a multiplicity of externally related causal factors, overdetermination involves a complex causal process within a totality of contradictorily and internally related parts. What attracts Althusser to Freud’s concept of overdetermination is its fruitfulness in terms of capturing a complex process of causality which functions in a contradictory social whole, composed of a multiplicity of distinct, but internally related and mutually constitutive, practices having a tendency – because of their spatio-temporal separation within complex social formations – to drift apart (see Marx 1951: 383, for the conception of contradiction intended here). What this means is that the economy, all by itself, cannot produce out of its own resources its means of reproduction; neither can the political or the ideological. The economy, all by itself, cannot determine anything and even to speak in this way is to speak nonsense. Determination suggests a simple linear mode of causality between externally related entities. While this mode of causality will be found in localized domains within social wholes, it cannot pertain at the level of the social whole itself, as the base–super-structure metaphor would lead us to believe (Jameson 1981: 25). It is because the world is overdetermined, rather than determined, that the future is open rather than closed, or, as Balibar puts it, overdetermination ‘is the very form assumed by the singularity of history’ (Balibar 1996: 108).
This radical and fruitful reconceptualization of causality is one which acknowledges the necessary diversity of human life while at the same time enabling us to identify forms of diversity that are likely to be dysfunctional – in an emancipatory way – for capitalism. Diversity arises within capitalism itself from a peculiar kind of fragmentation of internally related levels of practices that enables these practices to develop (at least in the short term) ‘as if’ they were autonomous, hence relative autonomy. Relative autonomy is a condition that emerges out of the spatio-temporal separation of necessary practices; it is a social logic arising from the coexistence of necessity and contradiction. The concept of relative autonomy enables the theorization of the causal effects and political possibilities inhering in the simultaneous connectedness and separation (real interdependence and apparent independence) characteristic of relations between the different ‘levels’ of practices – political, ideological, economic – in capitalist social formations. It therefore enables the theorization of transformative agency as a potential, and of difference, rather than homogeneity, as a necessary attribute of capitalism.
For Althusser, the social whole as ‘pure’ mode of production can exist only as a ‘logical’ or thought object. In the empirical world, the unevenness to be expected from ‘pure’ social wholes is intensified in the form of social formations. We have Althusser’s analysis of the Russian and later the Soviet social formation as an illustration of this situation (Althusser 1990a: 19). Althusser’s use of this example is intended to achieve several aims at once. First, it provides an illustration of the particularly contradictory dynamic of a social formation, as opposed to a mode of production. Second, it is an account of a fundamental destructuration (i.e. the dissolution of a functional relationship between levels) that throws up the possibility of historical change. Third, it constitutes a warning about the theoretical wrong-headedness and political dangers of economism. In the case of Stalinism, an economistic analysis dictated a revolutionary programme of privileging the transformation of production relations on the assumption that necessary, i.e. socialist or radically democratic, ‘superstructural’ changes would follow.15 Here, failure to pay specific attention to the cultural sphere resulted in the subversion of the communist project as the causal weight of ‘survivals’ counteracted that of socialist ownership of means of production. Expressed otherwise, subjects constituted by feudal social relations, i.e. peasants, were susceptible to and supportive of a personalized form of political power.16
The denaturalizing of subjectivity undertaken by Althusser in his ISAs essay centres on his reconceptualization of ideology as a necessary element of all human life.17 What the reductive Marxist stance ignores is the fact that humans are such as to need ideological constitution; in fact there is no human in the absence of ideology in this sense. Hence the much misunderstood claim that ideology ‘has no history’ (Althusser 1984a: 33). Ideology in this sense is what Marx refers to as a ‘rational abstraction’ in that it refers to a universal property of human life (Marx 1973b: 85). We are creatures of culture, therefore of ideology (Althusser 1984b: 154, n.2). Ideologies so defined are the conjoining of socio-cultural force and meaning in that they consist in a nexus of social relations and practices having the power to constitute humans as subjects possessing historico-culturally specific dispositions, skills, and aptitudes. Ideological practices are those that constitute the natural ‘to-be-humanized’ being as a specific kind of subject (Althusser 1984b). It is the historico-cultural specificity of forms of subjectivity that in turn produces the capacity for specific kinds of activity. Forms of action (practices) are culturally given. In turn, the necessary diversity and contradictory relationship of practices in capitalist social formations is the source of new non-or anti-capitalist practices. For Althusser, it is the function of the state to ensure that such practices do not emerge or flourish as it is the function of ‘science’ or critical theory to aid the denaturalization of capitalist ideology so as to aid socialist transformation.
Because subjectivity is historico-cultural rather than natural, and because social wholes are marked by overdetermination rather than determination, economism is bound to be inadequate as an account of the social, and of the way in which fundamental transformation is effected. As we saw above, failure to attend to the cultural tasks of subject reconstitution contributed to the Soviet failure to move towards the radical democracy to be expected from a socialist revolution: Stalinism was the outcome of an economistic analysis that was blind to the importance of subjectivity. Similarly, responses to Stalinism such as existentialist Marxism and the socialist Marxism of Khruschev repeated the error by assuming the existence of the right kind of subjectivity (Althusser 1990c). For this reason, failure was bound to ensue since neither yielded an understanding of the historico-cultural specificity of forms of subjectivity and therefore of capacities for specific kinds of action. In short, taking subjectivity for granted is bound to result in the subversion of the revolutionary project. This is the message that Althusser sought to communicate to his fellow Communists in mid twentieth-century France. It is a message that needs to be heard by those who advocate a return to classical Marxism, particularly in light of the issues raised by globalization. Models of class struggle and proletarian formation that assume the only ‘real’ struggles are those that take class forms or which involve trade unionism simply miss the diversity of the forms taken by anticapitalist struggle in the context of globalization and cut Marxists off from them. This is not to say that classical Marxism is ‘dead’ – far from it – but to insist on the fruitfulness of re-reading its texts once again, through the lens offered by Althusser’s advances. A return to classical forms of historical materialism now runs the risk of participating in the reproduction of the very economism carried forward by a seemingly global capitalism.
As Resch (1992: chap. 4) shows, the structural Marxist research programme initiated by Althusser has developed a variety of tools – concepts, theories and methods – by which to carry out analysis of subjectivity. Fortunately, we do not need to start from scratch. Prominent in this literature is the work of feminist scholars influenced by Althusser who, in good Marxist fashion, have been busily engaging with the best bourgeois scholarship on subjectivity and in effect taking it away from its non-Marxist origins.18 This work is particularly significant: in a sense, it rescues the concept of subjectivity for historical materialism. It also mounts a direct challenge to those who see struggles – whether in theory or out of it – organized around gender and other forms of identity politics as necessarily inferior to the more fundamental matter of class or as operating in opposition to it. But examples of the creative elaboration of Althusser’s rereading of historical materialism in order better to understand and explain the non-proletarian nature of the cultural struggles engendered by capitalist globalization are rapidly proliferating elsewhere as well, offering a rich basis on which to build a flexible Marxism for flexible times.
Globalization after Althusser: the politics of theory
If the global horizon of really existing capitalism is indeed the harbinger of a renewed Marxist project, we cannot avoid the question: which Marxism? This is not only a matter of explanatory power and critical insight. It is also and fundamentally a question of politics. By its very nature, globalization raises a set of questions about how we theorize the economy and subjectivity. The significance of Althusser’s work for the development of a flexible Marxism is that it enables us to address these questions in a distinctively Marxist way and in terms that strengthen the claims of historical materialism to be a genuinely critical theory. It offers hope of generating a critical theory that is attentive to the quite proper concerns of political economy without at the same time being blind to the importance and relatively autonomous causal power of difference. This will be a historical materialism that proceeds neither by reducing difference to political economy nor by rejecting its significance altogether. In contrast, dominant elements in the recent return to historical materialism do both. The way forward, then, is arm in arm with Althusser, not without him.
Any attempt to organize an anti-capitalist movement out of numerous particularistic struggles, many of which refuse even to concede that capitalism is the problem, will require discussion of
the relations between commonality/difference, the particularity of the one and the universalism of the other. And it is at that point that socialism as an alternative vision of how society will work, social relations unfold, human potentialities be realised, itself becomes the focus of conceptual work.
(Harvey 1995: 15)
Without denying the necessity of making connections between intellectual work and broader social struggles, ‘the creation of a diverse Marxian intellectual culture is an important political act in itself, with far-reaching consequences … the development of new and creative directions in Marxian theory is of fundamental importance as we confront the new world order’ (Callari et al. 1995: 4). In seeking to discipline historical materialism by excluding some Marxisms at the outset, we are also likely to initiate a set of practices that will inform and shape the futures we collectively make. Most importantly, those futures will reflect this denial of difference. In attempting to deny that Marxism is and ought to be a plural subject, we run the risk of producing a future in which it will be that much more difficult to retrieve the kind of pluralism that Harvey, among others, identifies as integral to socialism. Nor can these matters be left until ‘after the revolution’, or whatever comes to stand in for it. As Cynthia Enloe (1989: 59–60) notes, similar issues, of identity and difference, emerged in the Indochinese Communist Party during the 1920s and 1930s with respect to the status of women. In the interests of solidarity and the movement, the women suppressed these questions. Decades later, when the Party finally took power, women were absent from its leadership. The masculinization of public life in post-independence Vietnam and the willingness of the state to offer the bodies of young women as a commodity to the agents of international capital such as Nike is in part a by-product of this suppression of difference.
As we consider how to rebuild a Marxist project after the Cold War and in the face of globalization, it is worth reflecting on the experience of the Indochinese Communist Party. In this chapter, we have emphasized a set of issues that revolve around difference, both within Marxism and outside it, and tried to link those issues to the question of the production of the revolutionary subject. Conceptions of Marxism as an economism, we suggested, are not well equipped to deal with such issues. With Andrew Gamble, we agree that historical materialism offers a powerful and incisive critique of capitalism. But ‘if Marxism cannot help us imagine radical alternatives to the current world system, then perhaps it must be willing to abandon its claims to revolutionary praxis … to abolish itself as a theory of the future’ (Makdisi et al. 1996b: 12). Globalization, both as a project and as a new reality of world politics, forces us to engage critically with the plausibility of historical materialism as an explanatory account of the world, with the limits of its political imagination, and thus with its adequacy as a political project. This returns us directly to Andrew Sayer’s (1995) and J.K. Gibson-Graham’s (1996) otherwise very different doubts about historical materialism as an account of capitalism and points beyond them to David Harvey’s (1995: 15) call for a socialist avant-garde capable of articulating together the differences that divide us. A Marxism capable of measuring up to that task, we suggest, must grapple with a set of questions the contours of which we have only begun to sketch here. The contested legacies of Louis Althusser are not an obstacle but a necessary aid in that struggle to build a flexible Marxism for flexible times.
Notes
1. Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the Trans-Atlantic Workshop on Historical Materialism and Globalisation, University of Warwick, 16–17 April 1999 and the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Los Angeles, 14–18 March 2000. Thanks to Tarak Barkawi, Claire Cutler, and Jutta Weldes for comments, and to Tarak for the phrase ‘living in a Marxist moment’.
2. Postone (1993) offers an excellent critique, grounded in Marx’s own work, of economistic Marxisms.
3. For example, ‘Marx’s enterprise has certainly found its successor’; Editor’s Introduction to Brenner (1998: v).
4. The attempts of ‘analytical Marxism’ to provide appropriate microfoundations for economism results in a kind of Marxism without Marx. See, for example, Carver and Thomas (1995) and Weldes (1989).
5. See Fraser (1995) for an account of the relations between recognition and redistribution.
6. It is in this context that Chakrabarty asks:
Do Marx’s categories allow us to trace the marks of that which must of necessity remain unenclosed by these categories themselves? In other words, are there ways of engaging with the problem of [the] ‘universality’ of capital that do not commit us to a bloodless liberal pluralism that only subsumes all difference(s) within the Same?
(1996: 58–9)
7. If you do not submit the individual concrete determinations of proletarians and capitalists, their ‘liberty’ or their personality to a theoretical ‘reduction’, then you will understand nothing of the terrible practical ‘reduction’ to which the capitalist production relation submits individuals, treating them only as bearers of economic functions and nothing else.
(Althusser 1990d: 238)
8. For some – a-political literary deconstructionists – he is too faithful to Marxism and, consequently, unworthy of a place in the theoretical adventure playground that is post-structuralism at its worst. For others – the post-Althusserians – he is to be praised for having prepared for their own ‘post-Marxist’ paradigms. If, for the Nietzschean avant-garde, he is the Marxist Same, for humanist Marxism he is the Stalinist Other. As far as some anglophone Marxists are concerned, on the other hand, he is simply all-too-French.
(Elliott 1987: 327)
Obviously, there is not one Althusser but many, just as there is not one Marx (Carver 1998).
9. For example, the British journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory in its notes for contributors states: Historical Materialism welcomes contributions from all in sympathy with its aims of revitalising, debating and extending classical Marxism as a political project and theoretical tradition’ (No.6, Summer 2000 inside back cover; emphasis added). See also Rosenberg (1994); Wood (1995); cf. Makdisi et al. (1996a).
10. As a result,
Many Marxists have accepted the need to reformulate the distinction between base and superstructure outlined in classical Marxist theory even if they would not accept Althusser’s own approach to the problem of defining ‘structures in dominance’ that are determining ‘in the last instance’.
(Jackson 1992: 46, n.6)
11. As Sprinker argues,
Althusser’s aim … was not to deny historical agency as such, but to demolish the claims of voluntarism. Althusser never doubted that there are subjects or historical agents, men and women who make their own history, but he insisted from the first that for Marxism the other half of that oft-quoted sentence from the Eighteenth Brumaire is decisive: they don’t make it just as they please, but out of circumstances encountered and given from the past. It is not, therefore, any species-specific capacity of human nature (Sartre’s praxis, for example) that produces historical subjects, but the forces and circumstances of the given social whole.
(1987: 230)
Significantly, his position is not so far from the position of E.P. Thompson whose work Wood claims is so superior to that of Althusser (Wood 1995: 68).
12. Recent work on globalization and culture informed by this different reading of Althusser – such as Aihwa Ong’s analyses of ‘flexible citizenship’ (1999) – is testament to the continuing power of the modes of analysis his historical materialism makes possible.
13. In attempting this replacement, Althusser was consciously following Gramsci although he was also departing from Gramsci so as to eliminate what he saw as idealist/voluntarist (historicist or Hegelian) tendencies in Gramsci’s work; see Althusser in Althusser and Balibar (1970: chap. 5).
14. Levine (1981: 272), for example, finds ‘irremediable obscurities’ in Althusser’s account of overdetermination whereas Resch (1992: chap. 1) finds the concept to be a fruitfully supple source of understanding of the complex diversity and structural unity of social formations.
15. This insight was not new at the time of Althusser’s writing. Its importance for Althusser marks a continuity between his work and Gramsci’s, but note also Althusser’s silence on Trotsky’s important work on this question.
16. Marx’s (1973a) analysis of ‘Bonapartism’ is relevant here.
17. As numerous scholars have noted, Althusser’s usage of the term ‘ideology’ was highly idiosyncratic and infelicitous, not least because it leads to confusion between his argument and more usual efforts to comprehend the relations between meaning and power (e.g. Thompson 1990: chap. 1, esp. pp.70ff.).
18. For example, Hennessy has recently developed a powerful ‘materialist feminist’ critique of post-structuralist conceptions of subjectivity (1993, 1996).
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