Reading Marx E-Book

Slavoj Zizek

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 236

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Marx's critique of political economy is vital for understanding the crisis of contemporary capitalism. Yet the nature of its relevance and some of its key tenets remain poorly understood. This bold intervention brings together the work of leading Marx scholars Slavoj Zizek, Frank Ruda and Agon Hamza, to offer a fresh, radical reinterpretation of Marxism that explains the failures of neoliberalism and lays the foundations for a new emancipatory politics. Avoiding trite comparisons between Marx's worldview and our current political scene, the authors show that the current relevance and value of Marx's thought can better be explained by placing his key ideas in dialogue with those that have attempted to replace them. Reading Marx through Hegel and Lacan, particle physics, and modern political trends, the authors provide new ways to explain the crisis in contemporary capitalism and resist fundamentalism in all its forms. Reading Marx will find a wide audience amongst activists and scholars.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Copyright

Notes on the text

Introduction

Notes

1 Marx Reads Object-Oriented Ontology

Dialectical Materialism is Immaterialism

Diagram Traversed by Antagonism

Antagonism and Universality

Totality, Antagonism, Individuation

The Inhuman View

The Phenomenal In-Itself

Notes

2 Marx in the Cave

Caving

In the Cave

Surplus Abstraction

Now a Stomach, Now an Anus …

The Immanence of Reduction, or: Lacking (Animal) Lack

Obscured Reduction and Abstract Naturalization

Getting Used To It

Capitalist Nature/Anabasis

Notes

3 Imprinting Negativity: Hegel Reads Marx

Dialectics for Marx

Hegel and Capitalism

Theory of Labor

Notes

To Resume (and not Conclude)

Notes

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Reading Marx

Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda, and Agon Hamza

polity

Copyright © Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda, and Agon Hamza 2018

The right of Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda, and Agon Hamza to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2018 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2144-9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Zizek, Slavoj, author.Title: Reading Marx / Slavoj Zizek, Frank Ruda, Agon Hamza.Description: Medford, MA : Polity, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2017053287 (print) | LCCN 2018002710 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509521449 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509521401 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509521418 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Marx, Karl, 1818-1883.Classification: LCC B3305.M74 (ebook) | LCC B3305.M74 Z59 2018 (print) | DDC 335.4092--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053287

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Notes on the text

The first chapter, Marx Reads Object-Oriented Ontology, was written by Slavoj Žižek, the second chapter, Marx in the Cave, by Frank Ruda, and the third, Imprinting Negativity: Hegel Reads Marx, by Agon Hamza. The introduction and conclusion are coauthored.

IntroductionUnexpected Reunions

This book is written by three philosophers. Its aim is to find different (and yet unexplored) ways to read Marx. This collective project dedicated to Marx’s work (Capital being one of its primary sources, though by no means the only one) is situated within the specific philosophical and political conjuncture in which we find ourselves. It is, indeed, a peculiar, situation, though not entirely unique. To demonstrate its peculiarity as well as its uniqueness, let us take a quick look at the fairly “short history” of Marxism and communism. Marxism has a “short” history in comparison to other histories, such as the victorious history of democracy, whose flawed political form in its infancy – excluding women and slaves in ancient Greece – took much longer to actualize than one usually likes to remember. If we look back at previous historical situations and the state of “Marxism” or “communism” within them, we can recognize certain similarities with the present one. Similarities, because conceiving of emancipation (or revolution) within these historical configurations seemed almost as impossible then as it does today (maybe even more so, if impossibility knows degrees).

From a Marxist perspective on the history of Marxism, we can therefore immediately learn that such impossibilities (for example, of emancipation) are not strictly ontological, but are always historically determined and thus specific. The impossibility of conceiving of an overall transformation of a given political system is not simply conceptual, but is also determined by a concrete historical situation; it hinges on a specific articulation of particular points of impossibility. From a Marxist perspective on the history of Marxism, modal categories show their historical face. But this is not all we can learn from such a perspective. We can also learn that the practices gathered under the name of “Marxism” or “communism” often implied the conversion of a historically specific impossibility into a new possibility (of emancipation); a modal transformation that also always implied a kind of self-affirmation, a Selbstbehauptung, of Marxism itself, of its central assumptions, its axioms. Just think of the claim that there could be a different organization of society, which had first to be established and then found a historical referent in the Paris Commune, which was then taken as the starting point for transformations in Russia.

But, as many others – non-Marxists – have later claimed, from the history of Marxism one can also, and should, ultimately learn that converting what previously appeared to be impossible into a new possibility comes at the high price not only of tolerating violence and creating suffering for millions, including unspeakable injustices, but also of producing new structural impossibilities – or, simply displacing previous ones. So, what appeared to be a practical conversion, from such a perspective, demonstrates that precisely such impossibilities should be left untouched, as it will otherwise only result in a catastrophe.

So, where do we stand today? What is our position in terms of this history?

First, the year 2017 marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of Marx’s first volume of Capital. This historical fact in itself raises a series of questions (about the philosophical, ideological, epistemological, political, and potential validity and relevance, etc., of Marx’s thought), which are determining for as well as determined by the coordinates of our present situation and the history from which it originated. These questions are directly as well as indirectly addressed in this book. What you are about to read is thus not a celebration or unconditional defense of Marx; nor is it an attempt to dissect what is living and what is dead in Marx’s thought – in the way that Bernedetto Croce once infamously sought to divide Hegel’s philosophy into contemporarily relevant and irrelevant parts. Rather, what you can expect is an attempt to read and thus think with Marx as a contemporary.

Second, our common belief is that even in the present philosophical and political conjuncture, there is a conceptual need that is yet to be determined. A need for Marx – to paraphrase the early Hegel’s famous formula of a “need for philosophy” – a need to compel us to return to Marx’s oeuvre. Yet, we assume that this return, at this point in history, can only be of a philosophical nature. One might even say that the need for philosophy is directly related to the need for Marx. Why? The present historical situation is generally perceived as one in which we can observe an increasing closure of possibilities and of practical initiatives for emancipation; one can see everywhere a blatant regression to previous forms of domination and use of political power that for long seemed to have been invalidated by history but today returns with a vengeance. Think of the rise of new authoritarian modes of politics, including both “populist” nationalist movements and parties, and even more authoritarian forms of exploitation and value production – the infamous capitalism with Asian values (which after all has nothing to do with Asia as such), which seems to undo what Fukuyama assumed to be the end of history, namely the linkage of democracy and capitalism – including what may have appeared historically abandoned forms of exploitation such as slavery, etc. Yet, if this need for Marx today is located in a conjuncture that is also determined by the history of Marxism, one cannot properly understand it without also taking into account the peculiar fate that Marx’s thought has lived through.

On one side, he has been declared dead several times; sometimes he seemed buried under the charge of being one of the – if not the – ultimate culprit(s) for all the victims that the history of Marxism brought about. On the other side, as was already diagnosed by Lenin in 1917, “all the social chauvinists” – Lenin’s name for reactionaries who present themselves as emancipators – “are now Marxists (don’t laugh!).”1 “Marx” became the target of operations that suspend the radicality of what was once linked to it. Lenin describes this in the following manner:

After their deaths attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to speak, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge, and vulgarizing it.2

Without its revolutionary edge, Marx becomes canonized, a sacred name – and the sacred was always in opposition to the profane, that which is exempted from practical usage.3 “Marx” became “Saint Marx” (to use one of the polemical nominations that Marx and Engels themselves employed in their Holy Family). This canonizing transformation of “Marx” into “Saint Marx” detaches his name from any relation to the present situation. Such a detachment only works by suspending certain elements, certain contents constitutively linked to this name, and thus relies on specific operations of displacement: one “push[es] to the foreground and extol[s] what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie.”4 The acceptable elements of Marx’s thought stand in the foreground and thereby cast long shadows on what still seems unacceptable, exaggerated, brazen, or simply too revolutionary in his thought. The transformation of “Marx” into “Saint Marx” consequentially manifested itself in the form of a harmless idolatry that, for Lenin, enabled the gathering of political groups around his name that have no real connection whatsoever to the idea of emancipation or revolution. Even though some of them whole-heartedly demand change, they actually do whatever they can to prevent any proper change from occurring. Lenin describes this assimilation of Marx by means of sacralization by recourse to different operations: “they omit, obscure, and distort”5 the thought of Marx; it is a “doctoring of Marxism”6 into what seems convenient.

For example, some “replaced the class struggle with dreams of class harmony” and thereby “even [grew] out of the habit of thinking about proletarian revolution.”7 Anyone was able to be a Marxist, on the basis of forgetting, obscuring, and distorting what it meant to be a Marxist. Lenin provides a detailed list of the specific operations involved in doctoring Marx(ism): for example, repression, distortion, omittance, “amelioration,” denial, the cover-up, simplification, betrayal, vulgarization, evasion, disregard, malapropism. All of them alone, but, even more, all of them together, generated a more subtle practice of assimilating resistance to Marx(ism) than any direct rejection or attack ever could; obscure and reactive subjects simply reappropriate the very name representing emancipation. Marx was thereby effectively transformed into a harmless idol that can be easily adored as he is an ineffective, impotent tin god (with “Engels” as his accompanying weak “angel”). Such an idol, distorted and misrepresented, therefore enters the field of history without its revolutionary (conceptual) hammer. For Lenin, such a historical situation raises the question of how to remain faithful to Marx at a time when Marxism is being misrepresented – which is why State and Revolution seeks to undertake the project of re-establishing the truth of Marxism, returning to its fundamental principles (which for Lenin is condensed not in class struggle, as one might assume, but in the dictatorship of the proletariat). In short, he undertakes a de-sacralization, a profanation of “Marx,” which again can only be realized if one depicts the specific contemporary relevance of Marx’s thought on the basis of the concrete historical situation. The truth of Marx’s name can only be restored if it becomes effective as a truth of this specific concrete and singularly historical situation, and not simply as a transhistorical dogmatic canonical corpus – or the latter only as being part of the former. This means not judging the validity of Marx from the perspective of the historical situation, but demonstrating the validity of a Marxist perspective for a singular historical situation. The principle is thus not what Marx is as seen through the eyes of the situation, but what the situation is as seen through the eyes of Marx.

One can indeed be tempted to see a contemporary relevance in Lenin’s diagnosis, since although “Marx” today is generally considered to be “old hat,” even conservatives increasingly tend to agree with him. How is this possible, given that they would certainly not consider themselves to be revolutionary Marxists (or Leninists, etc.)? Often, the answer is that they take Marx’s economic analyses to be correct and convincing, but also assume that the political consequences that classical Marxists draw from them are fundamentally misguided.8 Marx’s peculiar fate does not seem to have ended. His theoretical position, having been dogmatically tamed in the form of an official state doctrine, and after having apparently withered away with the previously “really existing socialist (Marxist) states,” has become an object of scientific and academic study and is even of interest and relevance to those who previously might have appeared to be class enemies, but with no interest whatsoever in an emancipatory political theory and revolutionary practice.

One might also compare the present state of affairs with the situation in the 1960s, when Marxism was still an integral and constitutive element of philosophical, political, and cultural debate, an element whose relevance and scope were also supposed to be constantly reassigned within, and through, the historical practice and debates that reflected on and directed it. This is no longer the case. If the previous century was a period, generally speaking, that operated under the assumption that history is potentially open, that there are political possibilities – even if they have to be located first and their true potential analyzed later (revolutions, student uprisings, anticolonial struggles, emancipation of women, etc.) – in the present era, Marx (Marxism) seems to have lost this link to concrete practices. We seem to be living through a time in which what was constitutive of historical temporality proper before seems now to be absent (and its “motor” is often simply identified with the dynamics of the capitalist system itself). Today, there are no great political mass events (even though what was referred to as the “Arab Spring” came with the promise of a potential reawakening of history9) and previous mass events appear to have no lasting effect at all (their actual consequences, if they are not deemed to be straightforwardly disastrous, are obscure, at least in what concerns their contemporary impact – and this even pertains to the very concept of revolution). If, before, people were forced to keep their respective political, conceptual, and philosophical imaginations up to date with the events that they were experiencing, or even actively participating in, today we live in a historical situation, in which, broadly speaking, the present situation confronts us not only with an increasing closure of possibilities, conceptual means, and initiatives to even conceive of and think about emancipation, but also with an absence of those kinds of practices that force us to think (differently) and (re-)model our practical as well as our theoretical tools and means. As the famous saying goes: it is easier to imagine a comet hitting the earth than it is to envisage even the tiniest transformation in the workings of the capitalist system. This is the doxa that seems to adhere even to the many positions that claim to oppose this very system.

Already, Marxists of the twentieth century were aware that things were developing so rapidly that it was very difficult to keep the conceptual imagination up to date, as the unfolding of events and the reactions to them constantly forced them to think again (about how to continue, what to do, etc.). But, today, there is quite a peculiar regressive development that points in another direction: the reign of reaction, and regressive and obscurantist tendencies. Contrary to the optimism of the Marxists of the twentieth century (especially in the 1960s), we argue that the steam of developments will not result in a rise of the working class or the destruction of the system of domination constitutive of the present world, unavoidably culminating in socialism (as everyone today knows).

The assumption that there is a latent subject of the future revolution that just has to be located and mobilized properly seems to have been one of the greatest limitations of classical Marxism, especially at a time when the dynamics of capitalism are manifested in a form of social organization in which those who are excluded are no longer even exploited by the system; instead, they are kept outside of it, hindered from entering by new walls built practically everywhere: the slum dwellers, the refugees, and all those referred to by Hegel as the poor rabble.10 The limit, and also the truth, of the contemporary world as it is (which is, no matter how globalized it may be, therefore no longer a proper world, as Alain Badiou has argued), is indeed a reactualized form of barbarism. The famous and previous structural dichotomy of “socialism or barbarism” appears to be suspended today, after alternating between “(capitalist) barbarism or (socialist) barbarism,” leaving us with the tautological choice between “(capitalist) barbarism or (barbaric) capitalism” – the only game in town.

We therefore assume that, today, reading Marx carries a specifically philosophical significance. Are there still resources to be extracted from Marx, not only against previous forms of Marxism, but to depict an emancipatory orientation that can show itself to be in line with the present historical conjuncture? How does one read Marx to answer this question? Slavoj Žižek opens his chapter in this book with a claim that is the paradigmatic premise of our reading of Marx: what we need in our contemporary situation is not necessarily a direct reading of his work, but an imagined, inventive, and experimental reading. That is to say, we need to read Marx in such a way that we can imagine how he would have answered those of his critics who have declared him dead or tamed him by over-embracing a doctored Marxist position, and who are seeking to replace him by or even make him compatible with theories of a profoundly different political and ontological orientation. Such a reading maneuver can also necessitate confronting Marx with theoretical positions and conceptual themes from the history of emancipatory thought that at first sight might seem foreign to classical Marxism, as the chapters by Frank Ruda and Agon Hamza demonstrate. Ruda examines what becomes of Marx’s depiction of the very constitution of a paradigm of capitalist subjectivity (the worker) if it is read against the background of one of the oldest myths of emancipation (from all myths), namely Plato’s cave allegory. Hamza takes the cue from Hegel’s theory of labor, for whom work is an activity that imprints negativity in the work itself. In doing so, he aims to model a Marxist theory of labor that exceeds the distinction of abstract and concrete labor and investigates what this means for an understanding of Marxism.

These three chapters can be located against a certain historical and political background of a series of different readings of Capital. Hamza has argued elsewhere that there are Marxists who read Capital especially in the light of the famous line from the Manifesto: “capitalism produces its own gravediggers” – for them, a crisis in capitalism is a crisis of capitalism, so that it produces the tools for overcoming itself. For others, Capital is read in light of another statement from the Manifesto, the one about the permanent social revolution brought about by the bourgeoisie – for them, a crisis is a moment of the perpetual internal revolution of capitalism, part of its self-reproduction. Which option is more convincing? Perhaps neither. The much more frightening realization we have come to grasp is that capitalism does in fact reproduce its own logic indefinitely and it does reach an immanent limit. But this limit is not socialism or communism; it is (a regression to) barbarism: the utter destruction of natural and social substance in a “downward spiral” that does not recognize any “reality testing” in this destruction. In this sense, the “gravediggers” that capitalism produces are gravediggers of all alternatives, of the last grains of potential freedom, etc. – which is why no emancipatory project should count on the immanent logic of capitalism to point a way out or wait for its collapse in the hope that we will not be dragged along with it.11

As stated, we will read Marx as philosophers. This cannot but remind us of Louis Althusser’s proposition from Reading Capital. He and his collaborators “read Capital as philosophers,” a reading fundamentally different from those carried out by economists, historians, and philologists before.12 And we should add: we do not read Capital (merely) as a political book. What we are concerned with is not the status that Marx’s critique of political economy occupies in the general history of sciences, nor its immediate relevance for current economic analysis; and we are not reading Marx and his Capital as a politico-historical document, since it seems to offer no immediately viable contemporary political “program” to be put into practice.

Althusser and his students carried out a symptomatic reading of Marx’s Capital. He declared: “There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must say what reading we are guilty of.” By reading Capital to the letter and applying the methodology of symptomatic reading, according to Althusser, we can reach and understand the repressed essence of the text – there are always two texts in one text – that which is latent and can become apparent through such a reading. Thus, we can problematize and reconstruct the, as it were, unconscious of the text itself. Althusser goes as far as to see the existence of Marxist philosophy as being conditioned by this form of reading, because through it the concepts and its philosophy can be rendered explicit and “establish the indispensable minimum for the consistent existence” of it; starting from divulging the symptom of a given relation or of a given text.

Althusser and his group of collaborators set out a project of creating the philosophical foundations of reading Marx’s Capital. It is no wonder that Reading Capital opens with his essay, “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy.” Its title indeed encapsulates best the goals and paths of the entire project. Departing from Spinoza, the reading of Marx’s Capital was performed on epistemological grounds. Roughly put, Althusser was concerned with the question “of its relation to its object, hence both the question of the specificity of its  object, and the question of the specificity of its relation to that object.”13 Philosophy operates in the field of knowledge and ensures its (re)production. It exists in the field of knowledge alone, preoccupied with and thinking the effects of knowledge on its own terrain.

In the work of Althusser, Marx’s Capital occupies a very peculiar position. It differs from the “classic economists” not only at the level of object and method;14 it also presents an “epistemological mutation,” thus inaugurating a new object, method, and theory. It is because of this that Althusser takes the very daring step of asking the following question (in the form of a thesis): “Does Capital represent the founding moment of a new discipline, the founding moment of a science – and hence a real event, a theoretical revolution, simultaneously rejecting the classical political economy and the Hegelian and Feuerbachian ideologies of its prehistory – the absolute beginning of the history of a science?”15 In Althusser’s understanding of science – concerning which the authors of this book have some conceptual reservations – Marx’s discovery is about the opening of a new scientific continent, that of the science of history, which, seen from within the history of sciences, is comparable to two other such discoveries: the unveiling of the continent of mathematics (by the Greeks), and the discovery of the continent of physics (by Galileo). The opening up of the new continent of science presupposes a “change of a terrain,” or, to formulate it in more familiar terms, it presupposes an epistemological break. Every great scientific discovery – and for Althusser the discovery of the science of history is “the most important theoretical event of contemporary history” – involves a great transformation of philosophy. This was the case with mathematics and Plato (the birth of philosophy), physics and Descartes (the beginning of modern philosophy), and the science of history and Marx. The new practice of philosophy, which was inaugurated with the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, marks the end of classical philosophy. However, Marxist philosophy – that is, dialectical materialism – always comes too late, it is always behind the history of science, that is, historical materialism. Althusser also maintains that apart from lagging behind the sciences, philosophy always comes after politics. But, because Capital is, in the last instance according to Althusser, the foundation or “the absolute beginning” of the history of sciences, it is a work of its own history, thus marking a break with the knowledge of modern economics, of political economy. Conceptualizing it as such, by means of a symptomatic reading, Althusser and his collaborators read Capital from an epistemological position and attempted to draw on mostly epistemological implications of a philosophical reading, in which they placed Capital.

Unlike Althusser’s collective endeavor, this book is neither a follow-up and product of a seminar on Marx, Capital, and the critique of political economy (it did not originate from any common engagement in a university), nor is it the product of a secretive philosophical cell (that might be comparable to Althusser’s “Spinoza