Poetic as it is, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” is surely quite false, both as an empirical description of history and as a summary of Marx’s broader theory. For the same reason in both cases, in fact. It’s not true that, throughout history, “oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another,” because, as the Marx writes a few lines later, “in the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank,” while “our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps.” The direct confrontation of oppressor and oppressed is not something actually visible in history, but an underlying tendency that has yet to be fully realized. And, indeed, the way in which class struggle is not simply visible is an important feature of Marx’s theory. Read more↴
It was very considerate of Nina Power to publish an article on Rancière, Feuerbach and the early Marx just when I’ve been trying to figure out this relationship, and so when I’m in a position to take advantage of her very clear discussion. One thing that’s not clear to me, though, is the relationship between universality, which was the central term for the Young Hegelians, and equality, which is the central term for Rancière. Nina seems to consider the two terms to be more-or-less interchangeable, but I think there’s a crucial difference between the two. The distinction is what Marx calls:
a question of the opposition of the universal as ‘form’, in the form of universality, and the universal as ‘content’.
Read more↴
“You are doubtless like myself, you all have the same terrifying and tedious depths,” ads without products quotes Flaubert, reminding me of something in Graham Harman’s Guerilla Metaphysics:
In addition to being charmed by objects, we ourselves want to emulate them, and wish to charm the world. It is simply not the case that our fundamental wish is to be viewed as dignified free subjects with a chance to speak at the microphone of the universal assembly…. The kind of recognition we would prefer is always far more specific, since we often feel ourselves to be so painfully mutable that any specific role will do…. The one book that all of us would approach with greatest interest, that no human in history would be able to resist opening, would be a book of anecdotes about ourselves as told by other people. The appeal of such a book would not lie in some sort of grotesque human vanity, but in our wish to be something definite, a desire at least as great as our desire to be free. There is a profound need to escape the apparently infinite flexible subjectivity within, which feels far more amorphous to us than to anyone else.
Contrary to the usual view, what we really want is to be objects.
I do like Harman’s description of the “painful mutability” of subjectivity. This pain is compounded by the illusion that we are the only people to experience this mutability: so often everyone else seems to be exactly themselves, with the terrifying and tedious depths confined to ourselves alone. Would it be wrong to see this as one of the ways in which we experience the existence of inaccessible depths in objects? Read more↴
The young Marx criticizing the Rousseauism of the French Revolution:
The more powerful a state and hence the more political a nation, the less inclined it is to explain the general principle governing social ills and to seek out their causes by looking at the principle of the state – i.e., at the actual organization of society of which the state is the active, self-conscious and official expression. Political understanding is just political understanding because its thought does not transcend the limits of politics. The sharper and livelier it is, the more incapable is it of comprehending social problems. The classical period of political understanding is the French Revolution. Far from identifying the principle of the state as the source of social ills, the heroes of the French Revolution held social ills to be the source of political problems. Thus Robespierre regarded great wealth and great poverty as an obstacle to pure democracy. He therefore wished to establish a universal system of Spartan frugality. The principle of politics is the will. The more one-sided – i.e., the more prefect – political understanding is, the more completely it puts its faith in the omnipotence of the will, the blinder it is towards the natural and spiritual limitations of the will, the more incapable it becomes of discovering the real source of the evils of society. (“Critical Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian'”)
I wonder if a lot of this doesn’t also apply to Badiou (perhaps the RCP were right to call Badiou a Rousseauist). Read more↴
I’ve quoted William Morris from A Dream of John Ball before:
But while I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.
I was reminded of it when reading this passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire last week:
Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm swiftly from success to success. Their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds; ecstasy is the order of the day. But they are short-lived; soon they have reached their zenith, and a long hangover takes hold of society before it learns to soberly assimilate the results of its period of storm and stress. Proletarian revolutions, on the other hand, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own cours, and return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew. They deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts; they seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever. They recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: “Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is the rose, dance here.”
Poulantzas calls the state “the material condensation of…a relationship among classes and class fractions.” What I think he means by this is something rather complicated and interesting. Poulantzas’s point, as I understand it, is not simply that the state is necessitated by class divisions (which would be functionalism, which he rejects) or that class divisions cause the state (which would require a causal relationship between the base and the superstructure, which he also rejects). Rather, I think Poulantzas sees the state as a real abstraction. Class divisions are reflected at an ideological level, and this ideological reflection itself has a material form: the state.
I’ve been trying to pin down more precisely the logic of this position, because it strikes me as an extremely powerful form of materialism. I’m reminded of Damasio’s attempt to understand the mind as a physical reflection of the state of the body. The advantage of Marxism, though, is that the physical instantiations of the mental are no longer arbitrarily limited to the individual human brain. Here Marxism is also light-years ahead of eliminative materialism, as eliminative materialism is cartesianism in scientistic drag, still looking for mental phenomena somewhere inside the pineal gland. But thought doesn’t happen in brains, it happens in hands and throats, and pots of curry and flywheels.
