Marx, postmodernity, and transformation of the individual

Review of Radical Political Economics, 31(2):27-45 All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. 0 1999 by URPE ISSN: 0486-6 134 Marx, Postmodernity, and Transformation of the Individual Korkut A. Ertiirk ABSTRACT: Postmodernity raises for Marxism the question of what happens to the alienated subject’s consciousness and purposeful action in the aftermath of its alienation. Arguing that some of Marx’s own ideas can shed light on this question, I make a conceptual distinction between form of consciousnessand mode of consciousnessto capture what I take to be the kernel of his thinking on the transformation of the “average” individual and her/his consciousness in his Early Writings, and especially in the Grundrisse. Though little agreement exists on whether postmodernism is a higher stage of modernism or its fundamental critique, certain characteristic themes in postmodernist discourse are by now quite well-known and readily identifiable. Among these are the skepticism towards science, the criticism of scientism and the emphasis on the other and on the notion of progress, deference, the interest in the particular and the indigenous in contradistinction to the general and the universal, the stress on the connection between knowledge and power relations, and finally the dislike of doctrines and general world views, i.e., mega narratives. Though it is at times suggested that postmodernism and Marxism are potential political allies (Ryan 1982)) at the level of theory postmodernist writers see Marxism as another grand narrative that needs to be deconstructed even when they seem to reaffirm (more recently) its spirit (Derrida 1994). In this paper my purpose is neither to try to reconcile these two isms nor to rebut the postmodernist critique of Marxism.1 1 For a Marxist critique of postmodernism, see Callinicos (1990). and for an argument that postmodernism can theoretically enrich Marxist economics, see Milberg and Pietrykowski (1994). I would like Skillman, criticisms, to thank B. Ollman, E.K. Hunt, M. Goldfield, and H. 0x1 and suggestions. All remaining N. Cagatay, G. comments, G. Mongiovi, for their useful errors are mine. Review of Radical Political Economics Rather, I ask how one can account for the condition of postmodernity and what the advent of postmodernist discourse means for Marx. Not a few postmodernist writers see as the the defining characteristic of the “condition of postmodernity” awareness of the breakdown of ‘the grand narratives of the West and the all-around legitimization crisis that had brought about (Lyotard 1985). On more neutral ground, it can also perhaps be defined simply as a mode of human existence that is progressively colored and shaped by the commodiiication of daily life (and spheres of communication and human imagination), which has created a semblance of empowerment in the sphere of consumption enabling individuals to forge life styles that could deviate from what is dictated by tradition. Postmodernism is then seen as the culture of this new mode of human existence. Some Marxist writers have in fact understood it as such, and called it the “cultural logic of late capitalism” (Eagleton 1985; Jameson 199 1). I share with them the materialist approach that tries to account for postmodernity in the context of the transformation of life and the individual, but part ways with them when I try to bridge the story back to Marx, dropping the qualifier late before capitalism. The question postmodernity raises for Marxism is this: more specifically his theory of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, a powerful account of how the commodity fetishism, gives predicate becomes the subject under capitalism, but does not pay much attention to the implications of the nascent subject’s transformation in the historical context of commodity fetishism. to the alienated subject? How does his What happens consciousness get transformed, and how does that affect the nature of purposeful action? Below I address these questions and try to theorize about them. I base my argument on a conceptual distinction between The former refers what I call forms and modes of consciousness.2 to the nominal content of the hierarchy of ideas ranging from that might reflect different class systematized world views interests in the sense of Lenin, or to the constitutive elements of the “ideological superstructure” in the sense of Western Marxism. Postmodernism is then just another form of consciousness, or if be defined in you like an ideology, that can for our purposes terms of the following four attributes: i) it has a grain of truth; ii) it obscures reality more than it elucidates; iii) it serves the interests of a class or a particular social strata; and iv) it constitutes the building blocks of social reconstruction of reality. Its basis in reality (first attribute), I argue, is the transformation of the average or the typical individual and his/her existential reality 2 Below, I argue that the seeds especially in the Grundrisse. 28 of this distinction can be found in Marx, June 1999 Marx, Postmodemity, and Transformation under capitalism, which it unreflectively reflects (second attrithe transformation of the bute).3 Here, I try to conceptualize average individual by theorizing about the metamorphosis of the mode of his/her visceral “self-knowledge” which colors the way he/she internalizes ideas about the outside world and his/her place in it. I call this the mode of consciousness, referring to a deeper layer as distinct from views and ideas held by the individual. Thus, the telltale postmodemist skepticism against all mega narratives can be seen as the intellectual outcome of this very transformation of the alienated subject and of its historically unique vantage point along with the reality it is a part of. For universalist doctrines can only break down if the individual ceases to believe in them, and that reflects a transformation in how the individual instinctively situates him or her self in relation to other individuals and the outside world. The following discussion is organized into two main sections. In the first section, I begin by contrasting the capitalist mode of consciousness with the precapitalist mode, and then move on to discuss the main parameters of the transformation of existential reality under capitalism. At the end of this section I take a step back in the logical sequence and discuss Marx’s analysis of the historical emergence in thought of the ideal of the bourgeois individual capitalism was to create. This introduces the contradiction between the “political society” and the “civil society,” which is the focus of the second section of the paper. As Marx argues; the molding of the actual individual to its bourgeois abstraction presupposes the intervention of the political society, which in turn requires that the individual is willing to play the role of the citizen who is called on to act in the name of the state. This means that the fiction of citizenship has to be powerful enough to motivate the individual to act in self-sacrificial zeal and in contradiction to bourgeois individual. That the the very ideal of the selfih individual as the citizen does so, I argue, is ultimately an attribute of the hold-over of his/her precapitalist mode of consciousness. However, over the long haul as the bourgeois individual ceases to be an ideal projection and becomes closer to an actual fact, a new capitalist mode of consciousness begins to emerge. The political society and the citizen complete their historical mission, and the individual ceases to be a “true-believer.” Thus, I argue that the ultimate cause of the legitimization crisis the postmodernist writers talk about is the transformation of the existential reality of the individual and his/her mode of consciousness. I end by reflecting on the contradictions of the emergent politicization of the civil society, and what its connection to identity politics implies to traditional Marxist understanding of class domination. 3 In this paper I only concentrate June 1999 on these two first attributes. 29 Review of Radical Political Economics THE PRECAPITALIST AND CAPITALIST MODES OF CONSCIOUSNESS In pre-capitalist social entities, production relations are based on relations of personal dependence. The individual is born into a static world where his social standing, vocation, and mode of life is to a great extent pre-ordained with almost absolute certainty. The community binds individuals together. Or, rather the individual exists only as a member of the family, the clan, or the community. His “productive activity and his share in production are bound to a specific form of labor and of product, which determine his relation to others in just that specific way” (Marx 1973: 157). The community’s control over the individual is in complete, direct, and natural, and individuals are imprisoned definite categories in their relations with one another. In the developed system of generalized exchange, however, all this changes. The “ties of personal dependence, of distinctions of ripped up...” (ibid. blood, education, etc., are in fact exploded, 163). and all past ideologies, morality, religion, are turned into a “palpable lie” (Marx 1970: 78). In both social formations, the individual is, and remains, a social being, or what Marx called, a species-being. That is, in both cases the reproduction of the conditions of existence of the with the reproduction of the individual is coterminous collectivity-though of course what that collectivity is changes drastically. Likewise in both cases, the self-knowledge of the individual entails an “ideological” recognition of this essential social aspect of human existence. But, what varies from one case to the other, along with the objective structure of the individuals bond to the community, is the nature of one’s inverted recognition of this link. In other words, both the structure of the individual’s bond to the community and the exact form of his mystified awareness of this bond is altered, but the human need and propensity to reaffirm the social dimension of his existence remains. 4 If we think of consciousness as the bridge between experience and being, as E.P. Thompson (1978) once suggested, we can perhaps think of a two-layered cognitive structure that emerges from the life-experiences of the individual. While one is contingent on one’s individual experiences that might be shaped for instance by social position and status uis-a-uis others, the other deeper layer pertains to the mode of one’s unmediated recognition of the community that is more or less common to 4 For a discussion of Marx’s understanding on man as a species-being, see Hunt (1986). 30 of “human essence” and views June 1999 Marx, Postmodernity, and Transformation everyone in a given mode of material existence. I suggest that in this common mode of recognition, or mystified self-knowledge, one can find the basis for defining a mode consciousness that is unique to a given historical era, or to different social formations in a given era. Accordingly then, the pre-capitalist mode of consciousness can be defined as the individuals indirect recognition of himself and his bond to the community through a sacralized mediator, regardless of what exact form that mediator takes. That is to say, the individual recognizes in an inverted way his existential reality of being imprisoned in a static world, and in an existence preconditioned by his immutable membership in a given community by instinctively thinking of himself an organic member of an indivisible collectivity defined by a mystical mediator. According to Marx, in precapitalist social entities, the God is the mediator onto whom the individual projects whatever is sacred in him. The individual’s visceral awareness of the existential cord” is what lies behind this importance of his “umbilical sacralization, and religion is but a mystified expression of this bond. The observance of communal rituals (as conjured up by whatever specific form this idealist expression takes) by the individual is then the practical link that ties the inverted recognition of the collectivity to its reproduction. As I will discuss in greater detail below, during the period of bourgeois revolutions the state replaces God as the mystical mediator, and though the nature of social rituals change they remain as sanctified as before. By contrast, the capitalist mode of consciousness which emerges in advanced capitalism can be defined as the average individual’s idealized (and inverted) internalization of his existential condition of separation/isolation and objective dependence on anonymous others. The unity between the experiencing self and the experienced external world is objectively all the more multi-dimensional, and tight, but the relationship expansive, between the two from the point of view of the individual’s existential reality appears fluid and in fact non-existent except for the unidirectional link of utility and narrow self-interest. His life conditions him to appropriate his life experiences through the prism of his self-interest oriented rationalism, and he tends to internalize this as true independence and sees his connection to social entities defined on the basis of abstract political principles a result of individual rational choice.5 As capitalist mode of consciousness takes hold in advanced capitalism, social life becomes desacralized, and social reproduction no longer depends on observance of a common set of rituals, which in the meantime of 5 Hence the appeal of the contract theories June 1999 of the state. 31 Review of Radical Political Economics subjectively lose much of their meaning and cohesion-enhancing effect. Rational behavior, that is, its lack or presence, is hardly a distinguishing characteristic between these two modes of consciousness. For the mode of individual behavior in one, though very different, is as rational (or as irrational) as behavior in the other. In an existence that is not yet individualized, where one can objectively improve one’s relative position only by proving useful to his natural superiors, acting in one’s self-interest means something very different than the same where existence is already individualized and characterized by objective dependence on anonymous others. It is only in the latter that the gap between self interest and social interest acquires a systematic character, and for instance the free-rider problem takes on a systematic character. For only then the vantage point of the individual ceases to be an empty presupposition and becomes an abstraction based imputing the in reality. As Marx says, it is only by idealistically individual (and his consciousness) of the latter age onto that of the earlier that history is turned into an evolutionary process of consciousness (Marx 1970: 94), and only then can we distinguish the rational modem man from his less rational forebear.6 TRANSFORMATION OF EXISTENTIAL REALITY I started out the previous section with a discussion of the implications on human self-knowledge of the fact that morality, and religion into capitalism turns “all past ideologies, palpable lies.” According to Marx, “all that is solid melts into thin air, all that is holy is profaned” and the ruling ideas become those of the ruling class. 7 But, how does this happen? What are the dynamics that transform the existential reality of the individual under capitalism, and how do the ideas of the ruling class become the ruling ideas? Below, I specify and discuss four dialectical dynamics that help us understand this process and the sense in which the reality turns into a whirlwind. 1. Idealization of Equality-Depoliticization of Actual Inequalities. The bourgeois political revolution overthrows all social distinctions of the old society by “declaring” them to be nonpolitical. These distinctions which gave the old society a directly political character are by no means overcome, but they no longer directly or exclusively determine the individual’s relation to the 6 In Weberian sociology this is seen is thought to “rational will,” which Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. as the transition accompany the 7 “The ruling ideas of each age have classes” (Marx and Engels 1974: 85). 32 ever been from “natural will” to transformation from the ideas of its ruling June 1999 Marx, Postmodernity, and Transformation state, his separation and exclusion from certain spheres of social of actual inequalities reduce the life. The depoliticization importance of these inequalities in both a “positive” and a “negative” sense. On the one hand, the affairs of the state are no longer the private business of rulers, but that of the citizen. But, at the same time, the citizen is divested of his actual individuality, and “endowed with an unactual universality” as the “imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty” (Marx 1967: 223, 226, 229). He is any member of the civil society who is, just as anyone else, granted the equal right to become bourgeois, as long as he aspires to be something that he actually is not. That something, the idealized bourgeois man, is the real sovereign, i.e., he who is in thought, if not yet in reality, freed from the bonds of the old society which had fettered his “egoistic spirit” (ibid.: 239). 2. Personal Independence and Freedom-Objective Dependence and the Rule of Illusion. With the development of capitalism, “unactual universalities” begin to appear all the more real to the individual. The personal restrictions of the earlier epoch now acquire a general and anonymous form as “objective restrictions of the individual by relations independent of him and sufficient onto themselves” (Marx 1973: 164). This is just a reflection of the fact that production relations which were based on relations of personal dependence are now replaced by those based on relations of objective dependence, which develop in tandem with the increasing independence of individual producers and consumers.8 A tenant farmer’s master is no longer a particular landlord but the relations of land tenure. Not only the worker but also the capitalist becomes subject to the capricious vicissitudes of the market and the laws of competition. A multitude of social interconnections created by human beings now assume an independent existence, turn into an alien force that rules over them. Individuals perceive this as the reign of abstract ideas, since the social relations they have created are divorced from them not only in actuality but in thought as well, i.e., they only exist as one-sided abstractions in their consciousness. “Thus, in imagination, individuals seem freer under the dominance of of life seem bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions accidental: in reality, of course, they are less free because they are more subjected to the violence of things’* (Marx 1970: 84). 3. Personal Development-Personal Powerlessness and Isolation. Just as abstract labor develops on the basis of concrete labor and predominates the latter, abstract individual acquires a reality 3 “Relations of personal dependence...at the outset are the first social forms, in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated points. Personal independence founded on objective dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs, and universal capacities is formed for the first time” (Marx 1973: 158). June 1999 33 Review of Radical Political Economics which supersedes that of the concrete-local individual from which it originates. On the one hand, the abstract individual is the concrete individual who is tied to the cash-nexus with his naked self-interest and free of all precapitalist ties which bind him to his natural superiors (Marx and Engels 1974: 70). On the other hand, he is much more than that. He is the individual whose needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces have at one and the same time proliferated to an unprecedented degree, but have been usurped away from him by social capital.9 For him these abilities to a great part remain unrealized, and to the extent that they are realized it is only in a one-sided way and through his subservience to social capital.10 As social capital appropriates whatever creative activity one might have in the sphere of production, a sphere of pseudo-creativity gradually takes hold in consumption. The eventual commodification of everyday life seemingly empowers individuals through possession of articles of consumption in forging life styles that deviate from the dictates of tradition. The construction of a self-image that bolsters one’s illusions about life becomes the main source of self-esteem and worth. Money buys personal ability, might, and thus social status. 4. Enlightenment and the Development of Reason-Triumph gets of Unreason and Irrationality. As the rule of things generalized, from the vantage point of the isolated individual it becomes rational not to know, not to understand the outside world. At best, the individual can hope to become an expert in a detailed topic and rely on other experts’ opinions on all other realms of his life, even in those realms where his subjectivity is supposed to count. Objectively, rationality acquires a quite restricted meaning. No longer the liberating force against the rule of tradition and authority, it becomes confined to “the world of calculation, manipulation, control, exact sciences, rule over nature, utility, in short: the world of objectivity,” and divorced from “the world of art, inner feelings, beauty, human freedom, religion, in short: the world of subjectivity” (Kosik 1976: 59). The individual finds himself in a world where, “human reality is divided both in theory and in practice between the sphere of the efficient, i.e., the world of rationalization, resources and technology, and the sphere of human values and meanings which 9 “In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces, etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature?” (Marx 1973: 488). 10 “Universal prostitution appears as a necessary phase in the development of the social character of personal talents, capacities, abilities, activities. More politely expressed: the universal relation of utility and use” (ibid.: 163). See also Berman’s (1982) fascinating discussion of Gothes’s Faust as the harbinger of a new age in which self-affkmation becomes possible only when in a pact with the Devil. 34 June 1999 Marx, Postmodernity, and Transformation in a paradoxical fashion become the domain of the irrational” (ibid.: 59). Thus, in the developed stage of capitalist production, it is not only the abstract individuals alienated labor which enriches social capital, but also his reason, which is equally estranged from him. The rationality of capital which was idealistically imputed to the person in an earlier age is substituted as his own. He begins to act like a “rational man.” The idealization of one side of the first of these four dynamics (equality) creates a homogeneous social space across which ideas, life styles, and cultural values of the dominant classes can be transmitted to the rest of the society. Elements of the second dynamic (personal freedom) provide the ideological wherewithal for the ruling class in its attempt to establish cultural hegemony (in the sense of Gramsci), as the bright side of the rule of existential equation, liberty, individual freedom, property, are fetishized and presented as the universal law, etc., expression of the human spirit. Within the “sphere of exchange” these ideological notions in turn find a degree of support11 as they connect in the life experiences of the isolated individual to the formal equality of contractual relations in the market, to the limited yet significant incidents of upward social mobility, and to the-restricted and one-sided-personal development the elements of the third dynamic give rise to. Finally, the fourth dynamic systematically undermines critical thinking and cultivates in the individual what Lukacs had once called a “reified mind.” Having described what the transformation of the existential reality of the individual under capitalism entails, we can now turn to a discussion of the main parameters of the historical process that has brought it about. The Historical Emergence of the SeZf23ufficient Monad In his Early Works Marx remarks that the truth of religion lies in the realm of philosophy. 12 He sees the history of Enlightenment thought as the history of the philosophical critique of religion by the emerging bourgeoisie. In this sense, it is the history of the creation of a new image of the “ideal man” and society. The development of philosophy is the critical decomposition of religion by reason, which demonstrates the falsity of religion. The falsity of religion is established in the fact that it is shown to be logically inconsistent when it claimed itself universal and its internal coherence absolute. 11 In his famous phrase Marx identifies the sphere of exchange as the “ very Eden of the innate rights of man,” where alone rules, “ Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” (Marx 1967b: 176). 12 See especially his, “ Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy,” and “On the Jewish Question.” See also Lefebvre (1969). June 1999 35 Review of Radical Political Economics According to Marx, the reason for the existence of philosophy then becomes to provide what it criticized religion as being incapable of providing, i.e., the true universal, logically consistent principles of human existence. Thereby, philosophy creates in thought the ideal society and the “ideal man.” It reproduces the idealized self-image of itself, positing it as that of humanity free from religious flaws. It replaces one Absolute with a superior Absolute, one that is impeccably logical and consistent. However, Marx points out that no sooner than successfully completing its task philosophy confronts its helplessness in realizing its “ideal man” and “the perfect state of affairs” about which it so fruitfully speculated. For philosophy itself lacks the means of its realization. Those means lie within the realm of political action which alone can transform society, change man and his relation to the truth of other men and to Nature. Thus, Marx says, philosophy lies in the realm of politics. The “political society” takes over from philosophy its historical objectives, and the gap between “what ought to be” and “what actually is” manifests itself in the rift between the “civil society” and the “political society.” The creation of the “ideal man” who is nothing other than the “bourgeois man”-the self-sufficient monad posited as the emancipated rational individual who does not yet exist as such in the civil society, but whose ideal is quite real and has already turned into a potent force-becomes the aim, and even the reason of existence, of the political society. The contradiction between the two is borne by the citizen who is called upon to self-sacrifice in one heroic battle after another in defending the rights of the “egoistic man,” i.e., the “bourgeois man.” THE CONTRADICTION BETWEEN POLITICAL AND CIVIL SOCIJWY THE Just when capitalism begins to destroy all traditions and loyalties the political society takes on a contradictory task. The success of the main organ of the political society, the state, in furthering the capitalist cause requires it to be able to present will. While it facilitates itself as the embodiment of universal accumulation based on the profit motive, at the same time it has to be the constitutive basis of a new abstract community. 13 This contradiction is internalized by the individual as his social life is split into two separate realms, 14 and the political society is 13 This abstract community is not only imagined in the sense of Benedict 1976) in the sense of Anderson (1983), but also mysttfed (or illusory-Ollman MaEi. 14 “Where the political state has achieved its full development, man leads a double life, not only in thought or consciousness but in actuality. In the 36 June 1999 Marx, Postmodernity, and Transformation reduced “to mere mearts for preserving these so-called rights of man and that the citizen thus is proclaimed to be the servant of the egoistic man, the sphere in which man acts as a member of the community degraded below that in which he acts as a fractional being, and finally man as bourgeois rather than man as citizen is considered to be the proper and authentic man” (Marx 1967: 237). Life within the civil society systematically continues to produce “antagonistic” class interests and divisions, but the individual as citizen participates in the abstract community owing to the holdover of his precapitalist propensity for social attachment. The rise and the consolidation of the bourgeois society depends on the exploits of the citizen, the fantastic form of his self-deception, and the boldness with which he goes about creating a new reality derived from his instinctive disposition to truth, a disregard empirical reality in the spell of a transcendental disposition that in turn derives from his precapitalist mode of consciousness. 15 As Marx remarks, ‘The political society is as spiritual in relation to civil society as heaven is in relation to earth. It stands in the same opposition to civil society and goes beyond it in the same way as religion goes beyond the limitation of the profane world...” (Marx 1967: 225).16 Consider the way nationalism, a new form of consciousness of the new abstract community) (i.e., the idealist expression implanted from above by the cultural elite, succeeded in providing regime after the unifying vision that dismantled one ancien another. Especially in those societies that were latecomers to capitalism in 19th century Europe (Hobsbawm 1990), nationalism was the harbinger of a new way of life and “salvation” on earth. The reason it could mobilize the citizen had its objective causes no political community he regards himself as a communal being; but in the civil society he is active as a private individual, treats other men as means, reduces himself to means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers” (Marx 1967: 225). 15 In ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx writes, “But, unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nevertheless took heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and battles of peoples to bring into being. And in the classically austere traditions of the Roman republic its gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to keep their enthusiasm on the high plane of the great historical tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development, a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed speech, passions and illusions from the Old Testament for their bourgeois revolution. When the real aim had been achieved, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk” (Marx 1963: 16-17). 16 Again in “On the Jewish Question,” Marx goes onto say, “The members of the political state are religious by virtue of the dualism between individual life and species-life, between the life of civil society and political life. They are religious inasmuch as man regards as his true life the political life remote from his actual individuality, inasmuch as religion is here the spirit of civil society expressing the separation and withdrawal of man from man” (Marx 1967: 23 1). June 1999 37 Review of Radical Political Economics doubt (Hrosch 1993). but the self-sacrificial zeal with which the citizen went about slaughtering and being slaughtered in one war after another was not because somehow the class interests of workers, peasants, merchants, industrialists, and petty-bourgeois elements merged in contradistinction to those of the same in other nation-states in some unique historical juncture, but because the fatherland had become the secular God. Once again, “[t]he phantoms of their brains got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations” (Marx 1970: 7). In the twentieth century the fiction of citizenship was further strengthened by the challenge of the organized labor movement (Marshall 1964). For once at the turn of the century political reform incorporated the labor movement into the “national life,” in the advanced capitalist countries working class struggles concentrated on extending democratic rights to “lower” classes, extending the public sphere over the private, and, therefore, on making the citizen more a fact of life.17 Thus, in practice, the political objective of the working class (and its allies) has been to give real content to the abstract community promised under the bourgeois order by trying to repoliticize actual inequalities. Gramsci was perhaps unique in his cohort of Marxist writers who theoretically reflected on this process in the early part of the century. In his view, class struggle had to take the form of, as he put it, a “war of position” that targeted the cultural hegemony of the ruling class without which neither socialism nor a socialist movement could be viable. In other words, working class struggle, in order to go beyond narrow economic demands, had to become a war for the soul of the citizen, because, he argued, the success of the intellectual and moral leadership of the ruling class, and thus its hegemony, depended on its being able to put forth an outlook for the society as a whole. Thus, it was understandable that the political landscape was charted by the polar alliances of the progressives and the conservatives. Just as the progressives, led ideally by the working class and its allies, tried to give real content to citizenship, the conservatives fought a rearguard action trying to keep the abstract community abstract. This was no doubt historically the basis of the welfare state and the much talked about “relative autonomy of the state.” The less the state was overtly biased in its mediation of class differences within the civil society, the more legitimacy it had with the “lower” classes. Many on the Left have in fact seen this as the contradiction between the legitimacy and accumulation functions 17 Therborn (1977) stresses the important role wars and mobilization played in the extension of franchise to the working class in the advanced capitalist countries. He also comments on gender, race, and opinion which historically outlasted class as the criteria of exclusion from citizenship. For a broader discussion of the gender bias of citizenship, see Lister (1993). 38 June 1999 Marx, Postmodernity, and Transformation of the capitalist state, and have discussed the crisis of the welfare state, and contemporary conservative attack against it, in this light (Wolfe 1977; O’Connor 1984). POLITICAL AND CIVIL IN LATE CAPITALISM SOCIETY All the anti-state agitation of conservative politicians of our day aside, capital accumulation still requires the assistance of the state, perhaps more so now than ever. Likewise, class differences within the civil society remain as real as ever. If anything, especially in the United States, class differences have become much more pronounced since the 1970s. So, what is of crucial importance in the contemporary reconfiguration of the contradiction between the political and civil society, I think, is the “socially dominant” universal fact that the notion of the individual18 has to a large degree changed or is in the process of changing. This ultimate@ reflects the transformation of the existential reality of the actual bourgeois individual, and its salient features can be captured by the emergence of what I called the capitalist mode of consciousness. As the individual becomes closer to his ideal projection in his actual existence, use for the abstract community and the fiction of citizenship wane. His concerns of the profane world acquires an existential primacy over the sacred ideals of the citizen, who in his eyes turns into a relic of history, a character out of the old Hollywood movies of the G.I. Joe fighting the Nazis, or more threateningly into someone who is culturally backward and unurbane. The emotional pull of the abstract community and the sacredness of the symbols of its idealist (nationalist) expression remain a powerful force in the cultural life of the “lower” classes, especially in the United States where a progressive working class political culture remains weak. But, as we move up the social ladder, the nation-state and all that it implies becomes routine and already desacralized. Since the dominant individual progressively ceases to perceive himself an integral part of the abstract community, his purposeful action becomes confined to acting individualistically on his narrow self-interest. If he joins this or that group, it is solely to further his self-interest as a free-rider rather than out of with no apologies, conviction. He becomes the home economicus doing away with the various forms of self-imposed asceticism that hitherto bolstered his projected image (and the ideology) of the 1s The socially dominant notion of the individual in a given era reflects the existential reality and the self-perception of individuals that make up the dominant classes, and those of all lower social strata, which in a diminishing scale try to emulate their life styles and sensibilities. June 1999 39 Review of Radical Political Economics “upright citizen” which had also justified in his mind his position of privilege. 19 A “hedonistic” life style that is associated with “permissive” consumerism and a self-centered narcissism comes to define the universal individual,20 and the notion and the very language of social obligation in public discourse withers away. But, the fact that acting on one’s narrow self-interest becomes the socially sanctioned norm of individual behavior is ultimately what causes the breakdown of universalist ideologies. Because no one thinks others act in accordance with them is exactly why they turn into “palpable lies” and fall apart. The shared illusions symbolized by these failing ideologies support, in turn, institutions that are at one and the same time the means by which i) coercive power is exercised over the individual, and ii) one participates in the mystified abstract community and affirms thereby the social dimension of his existence. Their failure, on the one hand, undermines and weakens the authoritarian control over the individual by the state. For instance, it becomes harder and harder to send individuals off to fight wars (especially if they come from middle or upper middle class families)21 or demand any kind of sacrifice for the so-called “national” good. Likewise, 19 Though I cannot pursue it here, an important dimension of this change involves the transformation of the family and “gender relations,” for the “patriarchal” family was, among other things, man’s “haven in a heartless world” (Lasch 1977). that is, a kind of microcosm of the abstract community. Thus, given the traditional gender division of labor, man’s consciousness was split between the logic of the market and the “collectivist” spirit of the family, while that of women had as a rule been shaped by the latter. Thus, the women’s movement that has emerged with the gradual dissolution of the “patriarchal” family, which for a complex set of reasons overlapped with the weakening of the abstract community, developed two very different voices. One voice saw the problem of emancipation as one of eradicating all barriers to women becoming “equal” members in the public sphere as men, while the other indicted the inhumanity of the society from its unique vantage point, which revealed how little human life (and caring labor) is valued. Thus, while one voice criticized and condemned all aggression, the other advocated the right of women to become combat soldiers, pilots, etc. of modern 29 This is, according to Bell (1979)) the cultural contradiction capitalism. Bell’s argument is based on the misconceived notion that deferred gratification and thus a high saving rate on the part of the bourgeoisie is a sine qua non of capitalist economic growth. 21 In one of the episodes of a recent public television series titled Genesis, Jewish, and Muslim theologians to Bill Moyers asks a panel of Christian, interpret in the light of contemporary sensibilities the Old Testament fable of God testing Abraham’s loyalty by ordering him to slaughter his son Jacob. One of the panelists, Burton L. Visotzky, remarks that in this encounter Abraham passes the test of God, but fails miserably from Jacobs point of view, and that the fable had its contemporary parallel in the Vietnam War when the father was willing to sacrifice his son in his blind adherence to some higher authority. Indeed, the protest against the war for the first time in history turned the ancient fable upside down as the son rebelled against the bleak fate imposed on him by the political society. A companion to the TV series is now also in print: Moyers ( 1996). 40 June 1999 Marx, Postmodernity, and Transformation alternative life styles and sexual practices that were previously suppressed in the name of social integrity find an opening to assert their legitimacy in the mainstream of the society.22 But, on the other hand, with the breakdown of shared illusions the individual also finds it harder and harder to experience the social anomie increases: the dimension of his existence. Durkheimian free-rider problem becomes universal; the imagined community breaks down; and the melting pot ceases to melt. FROM CITIZEN TO THE “ AUTHENTIC” INDIVIDUAL AND POSTMODERNISM Just as in Marx’s discussion of how credit disappears during a crisis of circulation when exchange reverts to its primitive form as cash becomes the only accepted medium of payment, so too when social institutions fail the trust of the individual in the public disappears and social solidarity reverts to its “primitive” form where people are forced to trust only those who are members of their own local community or revitalized tribe. The source of self-identity shifts away from the abstract community towards the tribe, where the individual feels she is a meaningful participant, and her diversity (authentic-self) is valued and recognized. By contrast, her social security number and tax liability tend to become the sole vital signs of her membership in the abstract community. As the political society loses much of its pull over the individual, life in the local community-or what Habermas calls the “lifeworld” of the individual-emerges as the sphere of authenticity and meaning, the enclave relatively free from both political alienation (the web of relations associated with the state) and economic alienation (the market relations) .23 Resuscitating and defending this sphere from the onslaught of the market and the state becomes the constitutive basis of new “progressive” identities and associations. So do the shared experiences of marginalization on account of one’s living style, sexuality, race, ethnicity, gender, or even a common physical handicap. Yet and when long others gravitate towards their natural tribes, extinct they try to reinvent them. But, the vast majority vacillates between an angry frustration and longing for a sense of community, as attempts to intervene in public life through mainstream institutions on account of collective grievances prove 22 Thus, for instance, many homosexuals today demand not only to be free of harassment, but also the right to marry, become priests, and thus lead “conservative” mainstream lives. 23 Within the Left, for the reformulation of the concept of the civil society in a tripartite framework where it stands in contrast not only to the state but also the market economy, see Habermas (1984). Arato and Cohen (1984). June 1999 41 Review of Radical Political Economics futile, and they find out that all those illusions that kept them holding the line as patriotic citizens are indeed illusions.24 In this social geography, postmodernism bespeaks the wisdom of the “authentic” and actual bourgeois individual. It articulates a vision that owes its existence to the capitalist mode of consciousness, and thus stakes a claim to be the voice of the self-sufficient monad who mistrusts all forms of association and “find[s] in other men not the realization but rather the limitation of his own freedom” (Marx 1967: 236). It is not much of an exaggeration to suggest that this is a vision from within a Hobbesian world without the contract and no Hobbes watching over it. Existence is flux, a big blur. All social intercourse and meaning is infinitely variable and contingent. Other than narrow self-interest, only two certainties fix the existential landscape on which one goes on living: the sensation of pleasure and pain (the body), and a sense of detachment from all else. Power is also another constant, but not as tangible and certain. It is rather diffused, almost imperceptible. The individual finds herself in situations where she is coerced to do things that inclined to do. She feels dominated. Her she is not naturally reaction to domination takes the form of individual resistance (what Foucault calls Zocal resistance and Lyotard local determinism) and all-around impertinence, which together define the outer bounds of emancipatory politics in this neo-Hobbesian world. Only through’ resisting domination at the local level can the individual learn to respect the fundamental difference of others, and empathize with their own form of resistance and search for identity and meaning. But she mistrusts those who feign to speak for all disaffected groups or humanity as a whole, that is unreal. Since her objective dependence on anonymous others is lived as complete detachment from social reality at large, any macro world-view that questions the way things are is as meaningless as rhetorical ploy of one that celebrates it, except as some domination. Social reality thus dissolves into discourse, and all world-views become mere narratives on equal footing. Not one of them can be privileged over the others by claiming to be closer to truth. Only the narratives that talk about human emancipation distinguish themselves by being the most dangerous, for they were in the past responsible for terror and tyranny (Lyotard 1985). 24 In the third world, and likewise in what used to be the second, the weakening of the political society has taken on a much uglier face as it led to the politicization of primordial identities of individuals whose dependence on natural superiors remains strong. 42 June 1999 Marx, Postmodernity, and Transformation CONCLUSION Postmodernist writers make a great issue out of the argument that no extra-discursive vantage point from which to theorize can possibly exist. However, it must be born in mind that during Marx’s time workers, through their exclusion from society, literally had a vantage point from outside. For Marx, it was almost in the nature of a practical necessity that the very reality of their exclusion sooner or later would lead workers to demand a drastically new order, rather than an equal shot at being bourgeois. The latter thought would have been ludicrous then. In the twentieth century, workers won a seat at the table through their struggle. But, paradoxically, their political success and enhanced power deepened the nature of class domination at a more profound level. World War I was a time of rude awakening for the Left. The loyal citizens they proved to be, workers all over Europe acted as the guardians of their respective nation-states. As the century unfolded, it became evident that in their private moments they could even be induced to fancy becoming bourgeois. The dream made the abstract community so much more real. The cultural hegemony of the ruling class could bridge a class divide that no longer appeared to be a chasm, but some imponderable distance of a seamless social space. Of course, there were problems. A segment of the workers continued to hold out, and the intellectuals, as Schumpeter bemoaned, were a perennial threat. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, all this seems transposed. The political ascendancy of the ruling class and capitalist triumphalism of the late, again paradoxically, appear to hide a weakening in the structure of class domination at a deeper level. On the one hand, the ruling class today has so much greater control over both the workers and the social machine that molds the “reified mind.” The foot soldiers of this machine, the intellectuals, are much less of a threat. (Those who are not willing practitioners of reification are in disarray, too preoccupied with their own job insecurity and political despair.) But, on the other hand, the ruling class is no longer persuasive when it feigns to speak in the name of all. This is not because they are losing the Gramscian “war of position,” but because the very foundation that made hegemony possible is fraying. Not only the class divide has objectively become much deeper, but, more importantly, the abstract community (and the dream), which has so effectively bridged the divide in the past, has lost its luster. June 1999 43 Review of Radical Political Economics Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities. ReJections on the London: Verso. Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Arato, A. and Cohen, J. 1984. Social Movements, Civil Society, and the Problem of Sovereignty. Praxis International vol. 4/ 3, Oct. Bell, D. 1979. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. London: Heinemann. Berman, M. 1982. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster. Callinicos, A. 1990. Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique. 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Milberg, W. and B. Pietrykowski. 1994. Objectivism, Relativism and Importance of Rhetoric for Marxist Economics. Review of Radical Political Economics 26: 85-109. Moyers, B. 1996. Genesis. New York: Doubleday. Accumulation Crisis. New York: Basil O’Connor, J. 1984. Blackwell. Ryan, M. 1982. Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Therborn, G. 1977. The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy. New I..@? Review 103: 3-41. Thompson, E.P. 1978. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. Wolfe, A. 1977. The Limits of Legitimacy: Political Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism. New York: Free Press. Korkut A. Ertiirk Department of Economics University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT 84112 Korkut@econ.sbs.utah.edu June 1999 45