Marxism my ass!

Another post on post. "Postmarxism" this time. To be more precise, Laclau and Mouffe's insolent claim that Postmarxism needs to offer no apologies, when in fact it is a trojan horse packed with metaphysics, sent to burn the Marxist heritage to the ground. The affirmative character of "Postmarxism" can be clearly seen in four ideas:
1. fragmentation of discourse as an emancipatory movement;
2. conceptualization of the historical character of ideas;
3. discursive character of all social reality;
4. conceptualization of interest;

1. Universality or fragmentation of discourses - truth or dare

The idea that fragmentation of discourses (or "metanaratives" as postmodernists would have it) is emancipatory is naive. It is a move forward from Aristotelian metaphysics that were so dear to medieval scholastics, but it is a movement which stops at the point of Hegelian metaphysics. What is the difference between the two? While scholastic metaphysics hypostizes a certain state, Hegelian metaphysics hypostizes a process (the movement of spirit), what they have in common is their ultimately affirmative character. The intellectual move merely corresponds to the shift from a traditional society to a capitalist one, the latter making perpetual change its driving principle. If Aristotelian metaphysics is the ideological apology of a traditional society, Hegelian metaphysics affirms the capitalist one. Fragmentation of discourses is something that Lukacs predicted quite correctly in History and class consciousness, the chapter titled Antinomies of bourgeois thought:

On the one hand, it [bourgeoisie] acquires increasing control over the details of its social existence, subjecting them to its needs. On the other hand, it loses – likewise progressively – the possibility of gaining intellectual control of society as a whole and with that it loses its own qualifications for leadership.

2. Nailing ideas to history

The historization of ideas is one of the most important epistemological achievements of Marxism (the first chapter of Bürgers Theory of the avant garde gives a splendid account), but "Postmarxism" does not grasp historization in the Marxist sense: instead of the inextricable embeddedness of ideas in social praxis it proclaims the arbitrary character of ideas. For Marx putting ideas into historical context meant quite the opposite: showing how certain ideas are necessarily linked to praxis (those who believe Marx conceptualized a naive determinism of base and superstructure should attempt a careful scrutiny of the first chapter of German ideology and the foreword to A contribution to the critique of Hegel's philosophy of right - Marx referred to the latter with his base/superstructure metaphor). In his critique of Hegel Marx found truth in the religious lie that a better world is waiting above the clouds: "religion is a perverted image of the world, because it is a perverted world." Religion is a lie, but the truth of it is in the functional connection with social praxis.

3. Talk is cheap

While the following quote might as well be taken from one of the most naive parts of Aristotle's Metaphysics, it is actually presented to us in the context of "postmarxism":

Thus, form is, at the same time, both the organizing principle of the mind and the ultimate reality of an object.

No need to stress the reactionary character of this statement. Marxism rebelled against the speculative philosophy of German idealism that proclaimed that the ultimate reality of objects is form, Marx demanded that an analytical distinction is to be made between meaningful social formations (which he called the superstructure) and those that were not form (which he called the base). Adorno put it most bluntly in Minima Moralia, 36 - Die Gesundheit zum Tode:

Were a psychoanalysis of contemporary culture possible; would not the absolute hegemony of economy ridicule every attempt to explain circumstances with a recourse to the minds of their victims and had psychoanalysts not sworn loyalty to them long ago -

Perhaps some basic biology might help us to clarify matters a bit. In Tree of knowledge Maturana and Varela proposed a cognitive theory based on the idea of autopoiesis. According to them no system has direct access to its environment, so all distinction between system and environment is made by the system itself (the "paradox" of re-entry as it was later named by hermeneutics). But this does not mean that the environment as such does not influence the system without the system being aware of it. Laclau and Mouffe fail to distinguish three things: nondiscursive reality (for example the laws of historical development as conceptualized by Marx, or all natural laws), nondiscursive reality being the object of discourse (Marx thinking about the laws of history or natural scientists doing research) and discourse itself becoming the object of discourse (this post for example).

By reductio ad absurdum it can be shown that Laclau and Mouffe de facto negate the existence of social structure (meaning can manifest nowhere else but in the minds of individuals), but at the same time they lose agency, when they say that this non-existent structure is the only thing determining the subject:

For that same reason it is the discourse which constitutes the subject position of the social agent, and not, therefore, the social agent which is the origin of discourse.

It is self-evident that for any social theory that operates with both a notion of agency and of structure, both most be true: that at the same time the structure influences agency and vice versa. Everything else is the most naive reductionism. C. W. Mills made us aware of this problem when he was writing on the sociological imagination.

4. Now, this is interesting

Let us again start with a quote:

"Interests" then are a social product and do not exist independently of the consciousness of the agents that are their bearers.

While this is surely a statement of fact it does not render it any less problematic. When Adorno responded to Popper in the debate that sparked of the so called positivism debate (a little insolently named so by Adorno, Popper namely rejected the term positivist and thought of himself as a criticist) he noted that:

Only to those that can imagine society as different from the existing does it pose, to use Popper's term, a problem; only through what it is not will it unveil itself as what it is, and that should be the object of a sociology that is not content - as the majority of its projects is - with fulfilling goals of public and private administration.

Merely affirming existing interests is limiting oneself to administration of the existing. The point Marx was trying to make is that there is such a thing as an objective interest, namely the interest the proletariat would form if it would - ceteris paribus - know the laws of historical development. Since that is not the case the goal of philosophy must be to unveil these laws and enable the proletariat to achieve this objective interest. The thing that is dialectical in Marxism is taking the contradicitons of social reality to construct a notion of a better society.

Laclau and Mouffe ignore the very simple fact that - as Bourdieu showed quite convincingly - the ones that are most disadvantaged are also the least able to understand the factors that put them in such a position due to a lack of cultural capital, therefore unable to come to an informed interest. At the end of the day "interest" is a thoroughly bourgeois concept.

At the end of the day?

Already in 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno predicted this farcical parade in the colours of Marxism: "the weak work has always clung to similarity with others, the surrogate of identity."