Discourses on Marxism

Gary Fraser

Introduction

Earlier in the year the DGS published two articles of mine called Deconstructing Hitler, which explored a number of themes relating to Marxism and the question of psychology. The articles appear to have generated some debate, including a critique of Deconstructing Hitler from John Wight. The publication of John’s article by the DGS provides me with an opportunity to explain and also clarify some of the points I made in Deconstructing Hitler. This essay is not a reply to John’s article, but rather an attempt to work through my understandings of Marxism. This is an important discussion, (a better term than debate), and I am pleased that it is a discussion being facilitated by the DGS.

Discourses on Marxism

In Deconstructing Hitler I wrote the following:

Bereft of a theory of human psychology Marxism became an ideology which dehumanised the individual.

John, in his reply takes issue with this statement and argues:

On the contrary, Marxism is a theory which intrinsically recognises the humanity of the individual, but does so in the context of the social relations into which each individual enters in the course of their reproduction via economic activity.

However, John appears to have taken the quotation of mine out of context. Before highlighting the point he disagrees with I wrote the following:

In the hands of lesser minds than Karl Marx, the material conception of history often gave way to a crude form of economic determinism in which the economic realm was given priority over all other aspects of social phenomena.

The individual sentence on Marxism and psychology only makes sense when the whole paragraph is taken into consideration. In Deconstructing Hitler I was taking issue with ‘vulgar Marxism’ or ‘economic determinism’, explaining that ‘vulgar Marxism’ had a one sided view of human consciousness that was based on a misrepresentation of the Marxist model of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’. The Social Psychologist Wilhelm Reich, himself a Marxist, makes the following point which I quoted in the article:

The early Marxists interpreted this model as a simple relation of dominance and dependence in which the economic base determines changes the superstructure.

Reich’s point, which has been made by others, is a commonly understood line of argument and firmly within the traditions of Western Marxism. Let me quote at length what I actually wrote in Deconstructing Hitler:

In the false dichotomy between base and superstructure, Reich notes that ideology is rigidly dependent on the economy and fails to see the dependency of economic development upon that of ideology. Marxists, particularly those informed by Lenin, argued that the economic conditions for international socialist revolution had occurred. In fact Lenin was so confident that the ‘objective conditions’ had been met that he based the success of socialist revolution in Russia entirely on this premise. Bereft of an understanding of social psychology, Lenin did not take into account that the ripening for internationalism would not be accompanied by corresponding developments in mans structure and ideology.

The criticisms I make were directed at Marxist-Leninism, and I am surprised that John’s reply does not acknowledge the distinction I made.

Marxist philosophy has to take into account advances in political and scientific theories developed after Marx. Sigmund Freud once observed that humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science three great outrages upon its naïve self love; the discovery that our world is not the centre of the celestial spheres but rather a speck in a vast universe, the discovery that we are not specially created but instead descended from animals, and the discovery that our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story of our actions. In regards to his last point, social psychologists attempted to build a bridge between the structural sociology of Marxism, and the character structure of the individual as understood by Freud. A similar process is happening today, except neuroscience has replaced psychoanalysis as the bridge. Incidentally, I think Freud, who was an empiricist, and we should not forget that his initial area of study was Neurophysiology, would have been at the forefront of championing the discipline known as evolutionary psychology.

What I am arguing is that Marxism needs to be in a constant process of being reassessed against developments in the natural and social sciences. Simply put Marx needs to be read dialectically. This dialectical reading of Marx has a rich history and is to be found in the works Lukacs, Gramsci, Althusser and Sartre to name but a few. I also think that some of the theorists mistakenly labelled by Marxists as ‘post modernists’, for example Derrida and Foucault, were also attempting to engage with an interpretation of Marx relevant to post modernity.

Towards a Post, Post Modern Marxism

John’s statement that Marxism is a theory which intrinsically recognises the humanity of each individual is highly problematic, for which Marxism are we talking about? I think John’s statement is based on an ideal type of Marxism, and is informed by a careful selection of the aspects of Marxism which concur with John’s own world view, or regime of truth, to use Foucault’s term.

I do not see one definitive Marxist narrative, but rather a series of discourses, some complementary and others in conflict with one another. These discourses are historically produced. First of all let me explain what I mean by the term discourse. I understand ‘discourse’ as outlined by Michel Foucault. For Foucault, ‘discourse’ refers to a group of statements which provide a language and a way of representing the knowledge about a particular topic, at a particular historical moment. Discourse is about the production of knowledge through language. Discourse, Foucault argues, constructs the topic and defines and produces the object of our knowledge. Discourses operate according to particular rules; when they refer to the same object, share the same style and support a common political and social pattern and strategy, Foucault refers to this process as constructing a discursive formation.

Marxism is influenced by a range of discursive formations which have appeared at different historical junctures. Some Marxist discourses are indebted to the democratic traditions of the European left (synthesising Marx with John Stuart Mill and Locke), whilst others have been informed by narratives influenced by Leninism, and other authoritarian, or non-liberal readings of Marx. From this perspective, it is more accurate to speak of Marxisms than a singular Marxism.

With Communism’s collapse in the early 1990s most people assumed that Marxism was consigned to the dustbin of history. In response, a theoretical process of deconstructing Marxism set out to disentangle Marx from his ‘Isms’ and rescue his theory from the authoritarian interpretations responsible for Communism. ‘What is dying’, wrote Bensaid in his landmark work Marx for our Times, is the historical cult of modernity of which many established Marxism’s were only variants’. ‘Surely’, said Derrida in Spectres of Marx, responding to the Fukuyama’s end of history claim, ‘there has to be more than one spirit of Marx’? What emerged was a pluralist Marxism, not so much as a doctrine but a theory of practice open to several readings. Bensaid wrote, reflecting on the demise of Communism:

Released from his ‘Isms’ by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break up of the Soviet Union, Marx has been out of quarantine. We no longer have the excuse of his capture by the bureaucracy and confiscation by the state to duck the responsibility of rereading and interpreting him.

The critical reassessment of Marxism by post modernists, or post-structuralists (terms rejected by both Derrida and Foucault) revealed that the origins of an authoritarian Marxist discourse owe more to Lenin than they do Marx.  

Nineteenth century sociology, of which Marxist-Leninism was a product, was informed by the premise that society is a super-organism, a living thing if you like, with its own interests and belief systems. The human individual was nothing more than a blank slate to be moulded according to society’s grand narrative. The extensive focus on society, or on the economy, led to a one-sided view that human identity is exclusively socially constructed. Inherent within social constructivism is a dangerous idea that large scale social engineering can produce the perfect individual. Taken to extremes social constructivism denies human agency and human nature in general. George Orwell intuitively grasped this undercurrent as did Wilhelm Reich, Theodore Adorno and Enrich Fromm to name but a few.

Maxim Gorky once said that the working classes are to Lenin what minerals are the metallurgist. The idea, that human individuals were malleable material to be moulded into a new and higher species, informed both communist and fascist discourses. Lenin wrote that ‘give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever’. ‘The will to create mankind anew is the core of National Socialism’ said Hitler. No one speaks like this anymore because we know from experience that it is dangerous. As I wrote at the very end of Deconstructing Hitler:

But Communism and Fascism (and Fascism to a much greater extent) both instilled in their followers a sense of moral rightness in ideology which resulted in the social engineering that led to the Holocaust and the Gulag. If the twentieth century has taught us anything it is that we should be wary of one size fits all ideologies which attempt to nationalise the people into one particular narrative. These ideologies, the main two being Communism and Fascism promised the earth to their followers, but for those who did not fit into the narrative the end result was usually the concentration camps. 

Evolutionary Psychology

What is needed is a bridge between structural sociology informed by Marx’s materialist critique of capitalism and evolutionary psychology. But this is nowhere to be found in John’s response to my articles. Instead John writes:

Human psychology, the understanding of human mental behaviour and functions, Marx understood, and Marxists understand, as fundamentally predicated on external factors such as those very social relations and the consciousness determined thereby’.

He then goes on to note that:

The development of human cognition and the entire panoply of human understanding are founded upon man’s ability to adapt to and effect changes in his environment during the course of his reproduction through his labour.

I don’t disagree with the central gist of what John is arguing here, but his discourse is reductionist and one sided to a generation familiar with genetic theory, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.

For too long, the left, influenced by social constructivism, or cultural determinism, has been stranded in early twentieth century sociology and behaviourist psychology. Given his admiration for Charles Darwin I am convinced that Karl Marx would have been an enthusiastic student of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Marx intuitively understood that our ‘species being’ - to use his term - is located in our biological status.

Please note that I am not arguing that society is not important in determining who we are, of course it is. I just think that the left needs to take more seriously the fact that we are evolved animals, who bear the evidence of our inheritance, not only in our anatomy and our DNA, but also in our behaviour. It is important to point out that evolutionary psychology is not some right wing conspiracy to justify capitalism as left wing ideologues often proclaim. In fact there is much that is positive and reassuring. The human solidarity that John speaks of at the close of his critique itself arises not only as a response to social conditions, but as an inherent and evolutionarily acquired capacity for co-operation and reciprocation. (These ideas are explored from a Marxist perspective elsewhere in DGS Issues 6 &7 by Steve Arnott, in Chapters one and two of his series on Darwin and Marx).

John writes the following paragraph:

As to the mass psychology which Gary asserts gave rise to the cult of Hitler, and which in his view played a huge role in the emergence of other major world leaders such as Mao, Lenin and Castro, here he appears to depart from a materialist analysis to one rooted in idealism.

This is just plain wrong. In the first part of Deconstructing Hitler I carefully outline the social, political and economic conditions which gave rise to Hitler and at one point quote Marx himself. Here is the exact quote from my article:

The crisis in capitalism presented Hitler with an opportunity to make his entrance onto the centre stage of history. ‘Men make their own history’, proclaimed Karl Marx, ‘but not in circumstances of their own choosing’.

Throughout the article I continue to stress the political and economic origins of the leadership cult that surrounded Hitler, which I discuss in relation to Hitler’s domestic social policies, and then later his foreign policy. In the conclusion I explain that Weber’s theory of charismatic authority, which applies to Hitler, rests on leaders emerging during periods of political and social turmoil.

John writes the following:

It is for these reasons that the rise of Hitler and the barbarism of the Holocaust that followed must never be divorced from the material conditions in which they occurred, or else we succumb to a metaphysical analysis which in essence treats such historical events as the product of factors beyond our understanding.

I completely agree, and nowhere in Deconstructing Hitler do I succumb to a metaphysical analysis - (I am not sure who it is that John is arguing with, because for anyone schooled in scientific rationalism his statement is just plain common sense).

The premise of my argument in Deconstructing Hitler is that fascistic or authoritarian personalities exist before the onset of Fascistic societies and that the relationship between the two is dialectical, a view expressed by Reich, Fromm and Adorno. This methodology is explained at the start of Deconstructing Hitler:

What I want to argue in these two articles is that in order to truly understand Hitler, and more importantly the peoples that produced him, and then went on to execute his orders, we need to bring about a fusion of the Marxist analysis of history and the Freudian understanding of the individual.

Political ideologies which draw their inspiration from inter-group struggle can ignite a nasty feature of human social psychology; Group against group struggle was at the core of Nazi ideology, and also Marxist-Leninism, and was responsible for untold atrocities and human suffering. This is not a ‘metaphysical’ analysis but one grounded firmly in materialist psychology.  

The End of History

Towards the end of his article John takes issue with the following sentence I wrote:

Today in a world of standardisation, routinisation and bureaucratisation it would be much more difficult or near to impossible for a Hitler or his political opposite Lenin to emerge.

His conclusion is thus:

With this Gary appears to move perilously close to Francis Fukuyama’s now discredited and reactionary ‘End of History’ concept, devised in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and in which he argued that ideological conflict and uncertainty had ended with the final victory of Capitalism over every other economic and ideological system.

But John has only quoted one sentence from my article. The sentence needs to be understood in terms of the whole paragraph.

It was in this age of extremes, to use Hobsbawm’s term that Hitler found his audience. Today in a world of standardisation, routinisation and bureaucratisation it would be much more difficult or near to impossible for a Hitler or his political opposite Lenin to emerge. There is no epicentre of power to be seized, something Marxists have failed to theorise. As Bauman notes, if the time of systemic revolutions has passed, it is because there are no buildings where the control desks of the system are lodged and which could be stormed and captured by the revolutionaries.

I am not arguing that we have reached the end of history (an idea which is just plain daft and no wonder Fukuyama refuted it), instead that a Leninist style insurrection is a highly unlikely scenario in today’s complex societies.

There is not the space to go into a detailed epistemological discussion about the concept of power in post modernity, but I do want to briefly compare and contrast Foucault with the classical Marxist concept of power. Marxists tend to think of power as radiating in a single direction, from top to bottom and stemming from a single source e.g. the state or the ruling class. And whilst this is true in a substantial sense, it is not the whole truth; power is more problematic. For Foucault, power does not ‘function in the form of a chain’ - it circulates and is never monopolised by one centre. Foucault is arguing that power is deployed and exercised in a net-like organisation and he suggests that to some extent or another we are all caught up in the circulation of power, that we are all oppressor and oppressed. Power relations, according to Foucauldian analysis, permeate all levels of social existence and are to be found operating at every site of social life, a process Foucault conceptualised as the ‘microphysics of power’.

This analysis, informed by post-structuralism, or post modernism (again I want to emphasis that Foucault never used these terms), played a part in the emergence of new left discourses which challenged the crude tendency of some Marxists to reduce everything to class. Sites such as gender, disability, sexuality, etc became worthy of more serious analysis and consideration. Moreover, the ‘micro-physics of power’ analysis may explain why revolutionaries with progressive aims often end up oppressing people. Furthermore Foucault’s analysis of power is helpful in understanding why people caught up in the ‘chain of power’ can commit horrendous crimes against humanity. Here is a quote from Deconstructing Hitler to illustrate the point in relation to the Holocaust:

It is within these command systems such as the army, the police force or the bureaucratic departments of a modern nation state, that individual morality is moulded and shaped. In Freudian terms, the role of the superego in the psychic structure of the individual shifts from an evaluation of the goodness or badness of an action to an assessment of how well or poorly one has functioned in the authoritarian system. Heroic acts of resistance are minimal, and in the case of the Holocaust less than five per cent of the soldiers.

Finally John concludes his argument with this:

The ongoing global economic crisis should leave no one in any doubt as to the intellectual bankruptcy of Fukuyama’s theory, which he himself has since refuted’.

I have read Fukuyama’s book the End of History and the Last Man, and he actually puts forward a more complex argument than John is suggesting. Yes it is true that the book is informed by a crude free-market triumphalism and arrogance that was influenced by Communism’s collapse, but nonetheless Fukuyama raises challenges for progressives who believe in a qualitatively different society. Fukuyama was not arguing that capitalism had overcome its periodic tendency to go into recessions, so the current global economic crisis does not mean that his theory is intellectually bankrupt as John seems to think. Instead Fukuyama was arguing that ‘Western liberal democracy is the final form of human government’. I am not a Hegelian determinist, so I am sceptical of Fukuyama’s absolutist claim. However, even with the global economic crisis, I don’t think that there is anywhere in the Western world where liberal, (or what John would call ‘bourgeois democracy’), is under any serious threat. And whilst capitalism may be in crisis, the ruling classes, to borrow another term from the Marxist phrasebook, are engaging in a series of measures to stabilise the system, many of which will undoubtedly mean attacks on ordinary people. It is often said in left wing circles that everything Government’s have claimed about neo-liberalism has been proven wrong by recent events, and yes, it is true, neo-liberalism is a bankrupt ideology. However, the ruling classes are pragmatists first and ideologues second.

In regards to the far left or the ideological left, the reason for its failure to make any significant breakthrough in the West is twofold. Firstly, welfare states appear to be a permanent feature of Western Capitalism and negate the need for revolution - a good thing in my view. Secondly, people tend to be wary of ideologues and still associate socialism with Communism. This last point has created a political impasse which has resulted in the weak thought and resignation of political post modernism and acts as a discursive blinker in terms of thinking beyond capitalist narratives. 

Leo Panitch hit the proverbial nail on the head when he said that the historic failure of Bolshevism continues to weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Nowhere in the western world is a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary alternative a possible strategy; it is neither achievable nor desirable. Does this mean that socialists and progressives shouldn’t challenge capitalism and fight for a better society? Absolutely not! But the Leninist model of socialism, no matter where it has been tried, is incapable of transcending dictatorial control. Simply put we can do without it.

The process of rethinking socialism or creating twenty first century style socialism begins with deconstructing the left’s own authoritarian history. The future of a sustainable socialist analysis requires rejecting both dogmatic theory and the anti-scientific ideologues who espouse it. It requires building a bridge between the structural sociology of Marx and scientific developments in evolutionary psychology. In addition to this, a sustainable socialist narrative needs to be firmly located within the best traditions of political liberalism and social democracy. Only then can we build a better society that is both socialist and free, and, in the long view, prove Fukuyama wrong in the unarguable language of the historically concrete.

Gary Fraser

October 2009