The Involution
Marx opened his Communist Manifesto with the sentence,
“ A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre … ”.
But one may well ask if it is still a phantom that has returned to haunt the New World as well as the Old, or has it become a sort of hallucination? Did the Berlin Wall fall in 1991 not because of an exorcism, but for a much more banal reason – in the recognition that there was no real difference between the two sides? Was it merely a question of the difference between a privatized de-centralized and de-privatized centralized capitalism?
No doubt, the liberal democracies would rejoice in calling such an event the ‘defeat of Marxism’, but with a closer look such an event exceeded not only the traditional discourse of Marxism, but democracy as well. In deranging the categories of tradition, what has caused the reconsideration once again of all the old boundary lines between Marxism and Capitalism, State and Society, Bourgeois and Proletariat?
Of course, many did not have to wait for the fall of the wall of Berlin to recognize this closure of an epoch and the involution of boundaries. In a celebrated long footnote (p.434–37) to his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, A. Kojève had already made the hypothesis in 1959 that the United States was in the last stages of marxist ‘communism’, while the American way of Life was truly the achievement of a certain animality of post-historic Man. An extravagant description, but none the less so than that of Francis Fukuyama who, one year after the fall of the wall of Berlin, would proclaim a victory for Capitalism and a near evangelic achievement of the “universalization of democracy”.
What is this singular indifference to the old contents and distinctions between Marxism and Capitalism? Does it begin to demarcate a language, apparently formal, in which there is an involution of categories in a reference to Marxism today? If so, we should ask what would it mean to re-write Marx’s Manifesto today to read:
“A hallucination has been discovered in the old and the new world — the hallucination of communism …”
This is Part II of an estimated three part series whose aim is to address a new form of Absolute censorship transforming private and public dialogue today. In Part I, I announced the purpose of these texts and indicated how the collapse of public dialogue exemplified in a recent debate on Marxism and Capitalism can be clarified in reference to a new form of Absolute censor and delirium. Here, in Part II, I present a brief, but explicit, analysis of what was said – and more importantly, what was not — during the debate and how the ultimate protagonist was neither Marxism nor Capitalism, but Happiness.
Twiddle-Dee’s Ten Propositions on Marxist-Communism
Ask yourself what Marxism is, and most would probably find something like the list below acceptable:
• (1) Marx identifies history with class struggle
• (2) Marx identifies history with a binary class struggle of the Proletariat against the Bourgeoise
• (3) Marx thinks the Proletariat is good and Bourgeoise bad
• (4) Marx is a proponent of violent revolution overthrowing the Bourgeoise and Capitalism
• (5) Marx thinks a centralized Dictatorship of the Proletariat would take the place of Capitalism and be run by a Communist Party
• (6) Marx thinks it is possible to organize anew, from the beginning, the complexities of modern society with a revolution of the Proletariat taking control
• (7) Marx assumes that the labor value of the Capitalist-Manager is zero and only exploitative of the worker
• (8) Marx proposes that all profit is bad and theft
• (9) Marx assumes an economic system run by a Dictatorship of the Proletariat will need to become hyper-productive to address all the needs of the post-revolutionary state; Marx assumes this can be done with no explications
• (10) Marx assumes people will simply be satisfied once and for all when their needs are fulfilled by the State.
If you have agreed with any of the ten statements above, then you have done two things:
1) agreed with a statement formulated by Tweedledee in the Toronto debate (see Part I )as a fundamental tenet of Marxism and critiqued by him as absurd;
2) agreed with a monument of Marxism and Marx: a stereotype that, at best, has become a kind of ghost, or déja vu, at worst, a hallucination or mediatic nonsense.
This short article is an attempt to de-monumentalize Marxism, while accounting for what goes unsaid in its production of phantoms and delirium.
Fact Check: What Was Not Said About Marx and Rarely Is
In his political debate with Twiddledum, most of what Twiddledee assumed to be representative of Marxism is, he told us, supported by his reading of Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848); the rest of these representative statements, he didn’t tell us, are a kind of déja vu of old Communist slogans that were circulating during the Cold War.
Indeed, after isolating these ten or so repetitive themes of Marxism, Twiddledee then went onto to try to give counterexamples to prove their absurdity without recognizing that his critique of Marx is based on statements either not found in Marx or that have already been critiqued by Marx himself.
A few examples will serve to bring out what is at stake in this problem of déja-vu.
In 1872, twenty four years after the publication Manifesto, Marx wrote a preface that makes it clear:
no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today.
Contradicting Tweedledee’s proposition:
• (4) Marx is a proponent of violent revolution overthrowing the Bourgeoise and Capitalism
It is well known that Marx is ambivalent towards any use of force or violence as a means of revolution (see Marx’s analysis of the Paris Commune and his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte). It was only much later, with Lenin’s militarization of Marx that a certain Marxist-Leninism began to advocate violence as means of revolution. In fact, Marx and Engels foresaw that a peaceful revolution could take place by legal and democratic institutions in England, Netherlands, and the United States.
Or again, Marx states:
In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated.
Contradicting Tweedledee’s proposition:
• (6) Marx thinks it is possible to organize anew, from the beginning, the complexities of modern society with a revolution of the Proletariat taking control
Which is again contradicted by the proposition below.
One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” (See The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’ s Association 1871, where this point is further developed.)
Furthermore, in his 1872 preface Marx makes the difference between ‘principles’ and the ‘practical application’ of this analysis; and that while the former, “on the whole” remained the same, the ‘practical application’ must be changed. Said otherwise, the irreducibility of Marxist’s principles are not the same as ‘applied Marxism’, i.e., the tenets used to determine a political action or organization made in the name of Marxism. This is important because what Twiddledee focusses upon in his list, (1),(2) history as a binary class struggle between Bourgeoise and Proletariat, (4) violent revolution, (5) installation of a Dictator of the Proletariat, (6) rebirth of society from the revolution, etc., are not first principles, but ‘applied Marx’ and organizational questions directed towards the formation of a political formation. Moreover, many can not be found in Marx himself but are slogans and rumors going back to the Cold War and thefabrication of what has become known as ‘cultural’ Marxism.
Phantom or Hallucination?
The consequences of this brief survey reveal a geological fault.
On one hand, it is possible to say that the Toronto debate was not so much a critical debate on contemporary politics, but an exorcism: a casting out of the demons that had invaded Europe at the turn of the last century had returned to the New World to cast their shadows.
On the other, it is possible to show that far from being frightened by the spectre of Marxism, we were invited to attend a mediatic event where there was no attempt to exorcise Marxism since it did not even have the existence of a ghost! Not only was there no confrontation between Twiddledee and Twiddledum, but the general atmosphere was that of a T.V. talk show. In fact, after Twiddledee presented his list of ten critiques of Marxism, Twiddledum did not even acknowledge a critique had been made and went onto discuss a subject that had nothing to do with Twiddledee’s critique.
What is the origin of this disconnect? And how does it situate not so much a phantom, but a hallucination?
Let us take another example in order to situate the divergence between phantom and hallucination.
Take another look at Tweedledee’s proposition (5):
• (5) Marx thinks a centralized Dictatorship of the Proletariat would take the place of Capitalism and be run by a Communist Party
To my knowledge, there is no place in Marx where the Dictatorship of the Proletariat must be equated with a Communist Party (as it was with Lenin). In fact, again, Marx states the opposite:
One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” (See The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’ s Association 1871, where this point is further developed.)
And if this were not enough, there are other critiques of Proletariat revolution by Marx that show Twiddledee, far from being anti-Marxist, is actually echoing his words. Twiddledee proposes that what he calls the tenets of communism don’t work and are impossible, but this is exactly what Marx says:
Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of many the wealth of the few. It aimed at expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor. But this is impossible communism!!
Indeed, all the absurdities that Twiddledee claimed to have found in Marx, had already been foreseen in Marx’s own critique of Communism more than a hundred years earlier.
So what is possible communism? Marx tells us himself:
getting under control and putting to an end the constant anarchy and periodic convulsions that are the fatality of capitalist production.
This Marxism was never spoken of by Twiddledee: he does not focus on first principles or crucial economic problems such as that of surplus value or tie this into the exploitation of the worker by the economic system; instead, as a good psychologist, he focused on the ghosts people have, the psychological characteristics of the employee/employer relation and not the economic component of Marx’s political theory.
What Is Impossible To Symbolize Returns
Here, then, if my argument has been clear so far, you may begin to catch a glimpse of the problem shadowing the political debate between Twiddledee and Twiddledum. It was not so much that they took sides and then debated the plusses or minuses of Capitalism or Marxism, but that there was simply something impossible to say from the outset – and what replaced this impossibility returned on the scene as a ghost or hallucination.
That is to say, there was both:
a) a weak impossibility which conjures up a phantom of Marx like an uncanny déja-vu, that is not so much critiqued or debated, but exorcised, obsessed with, and chanted away;
and,
b) a strong impossibility where Marxism refers to something non-dialectical, where one can say one thing and its opposite without any contradiction; where it is not a question of an imaginary Marx, a déja-vu, or uncanny ghost from another time, but something much more real: an ‘autism of two’ where any attempt of addressing either Marx or one’s political foe, becomes impossible and replaced by a hallucination: a non-interpretable block of signification that is believed in despite its inconsistency.
In Guise of a Conclusion
If the dominant discourse of liberal democracy need not reflect the ideology of Capitalism, just as a Marxist discourse need not naturally reflect that of the Proletariat, then we must be careful not to reduce a political debate to a problem of pitting one ideology against another. There is a much more important question of what becomes impossible to symbolize –or can only be done so as if one were addressing a phantom or hallucinating.
For not only can two political ‘enemies’ begin to mirror each other, but they may well only be able to dis-identify from each other through paranoiac acts of violence and aggression. And this may well be the reason why Tweedledee and Twiddledum could not find anything of substance to disagree about. For if anything were to become serious, if anything were to get off the level of mediatic presentation and laughter, in an instant, it would require something like a brute act of force, an army, to distinguish one from the other.
Part III will show the following: the first weak impossibility (a) of any political address is both productive of a phantom and the effect of a relative censor, while the second strong impossibility (b), is productive of a hallucination and the effect of a more Absolute censor.
Clinically speaking, it will be a question in Part III of showing how these two relative/absolute modes of censorship can be put in correspondence with the phantoms and hallucinations of, respectively, a neurotico-perverse and psychotic position.
Spring 2019
