What in the hell …

It’s the title of a short book by Etienne Balibar. I’ve just started it. Since it’s so short, I’ll try to keep all my notes on it in this post, which means multiple edits.

Balibar begins with “a somewhat paradoxical thesis,” that “there is no Marxist philosophy and there never will be” and “Marx is more important for philosophy than ever before.” Depending on one’s mood, this is provocative or annoying. Balibar makes a more useful distinction immediately following, between two referents for the phrase ‘Marxist philosophy,’ namley “the ‘world-view’ of the socialist movement, based on the idea of the historic role of the working class, and the system attributed to Marx.” Balibar points out that despite the view of some Marxists that these two referents were inextricably bound up with each other, “neither of these ideas is strictly connected with the other.” (1.)

I find the distinction useful, but I want to quibble with the first part, the world-view of the socialist movement. Put simply - why call that world-view marxist? Not all socialists are or were marxists. (As just one example this piece by Wayne Price.) Both the identity of the those who used the name marxist and the identity of socialism as marxist were never fully accomplished - that is, never as fully accomplished within the set of actual adherents to these names as they were within the descriptions of each written about in various places. And at least some of the level of identity attained was the result of various sorts of force (force other than rational argument) and political machination. Not that Balibar is necessarily conflating the terms in this way - he states on the next page that there is “no Marxist philosophy, either as the world-view of a social movement, or as the doctrine or system of an author called Marx,” - but I think the point still bears mention.

Balibar calls the period from 1890-1990 “the great cycle during which Marxism functioned as an organizational doctrine,” a period which as come to an end. The end “added nothing new to the discussion” of the philosophy of Marx and marxism, but it “swept away the interests which opposed its being opened up.” (2.)

Rather than philosophy, Marx’s work is non- or anti-philosophy for Balibar (2), and Marx’s thought does not form “a unified system” but rather “an at least potential plurality of doctrines.” (4.) Balibar characterizes Marx as continually falling short of philosophy and/or going beyond philosophy. The former is “stating propositions as ‘conclusions without premisses.” Balibar’s example is this quote from the 18th Brumaire: “Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.” The latter, going beyond philosophy, means essentially a relativizing of philosophy: demonstrating “that philosophy is not an autonomous activity, but one determined by the position it occupies in the field of social conflicts and, in particular, in that of the class struggle.” (4.)

I’m ambivalent on both of these - not Balibar’s formulations, but on what his formulations pick out in/about Marx’s work. I think with the former they could be thought of as sort of assertions could be thought as axioms (and shibboleths?), anchor points for further thought. At the same time, their usefulness is contextual which means they’re only sometimes useful. On the second, I agree and yet … ‘determined by’ is a phrase I’m not keen on. Why not ‘functional for’ or ‘which is a tool used by people who make decisions at least in part determined by’? And it also seems to me that this point might itself be a philosophical one, at the same time that it poses a procedure for treating philosophical arguments along the lines of ‘for any philosophical position look for its determining context.’ Since Balibar does not run this procedure on this philosophical position it’s hard to know if the position is coherent or not (ie, is the characterization of philosophy here simply true such that it’s the one example of a philosophical position not determined by its social position? or is it also determined by its social position and if so then I’d like to see that determination explained and I’d like to know if that determination impacts the truth value of the position or not). Incidentally, this second aspect, the relativizing or deflationary sensibility, is exactly what I like in Richard Rorty, despite aspects of his work that I don’t like. My quibbles with Balibar’s formulations are, I think, mainly along the lines of ‘this deflationary position could itself stand a bit of deflationary treatment.’ In this case I think the position could not only survive such a treatment but would be stronger for it.

Balibar then moves to a characterization of Marx that I am on the one hand sympathetic to but on the other kind of annoyed by. This is what prompted me to write this post - I had planned to just read the book…

He writes that “after Marx, philosophy is no longer as it was before. An irreversible event has occurred, one which is not comparable with the emergence of a new philosophical point of view” - perhaps then for Balibar the characterization of philosophy as determined by position within a field of social conflicts is not a philosophical position? a conclusion without premisses? - “because it not only obliges us to change our ideas or methods, but to transform the practice of philosophy.” (4.) (Balibar adds that others have had this effect, such as Freud.) “What happened with Marx was precisely a displacement of the site and the questions and objectives of philosophy, which one may accept or reject, but which is so compelling that it cannot be ignored.” (5.)

On the one hand, yes, of course, absolutely. On the other hand, does the characterization of philosophy and Marx and all that here really amount to anything other than ‘I think this is very important stuff’? It seems to me that it doesn’t, and I don’t like the extended metaphor for this - it’d be better to just say ‘this is important’ because these sorts of metaphors are apt to cause confusion. Let’s say Balibar means it, takes this metaphor seriously. Balibar writes there is “no such thing as an ‘eternal philosophy, always identical with itself” — yes, of course, this is part of agreeing with the deflationary perspective Balibar calls ‘going beyond philosophy’ (though I guess I want to say that this perspective can itself be called a philosophical one; insofar as Balibar doesn’t have an argument about why this can’t be philosophical then, well, he doesn’t have an argument, and insofar as he does have such an argument he will need - or need that argument to be - a metaphilosophical argument about why that argument is not itself a philosophical argument) — and he continues, “in philosophy, there are turning points, thresholds beyond which there is no turning back.” (5.) And while I like the emphasis on philosophical change, that philosophy too is historical, here I want to put the brakes on, because to identify a turning point in this way seems to me readable, at least uncharitably, as precisely involving an implicit attribution of identity to philosophy. Philosophy is not eternal but changes over time. Philosophy is different over time, it is heterogeneous when considered temporally. And yet, to identify turning points in which philosophy as a whole changes seems to me to imply a sort of spatial homogeneity: at or within any particular point in time - at a minimum, at or within points which are not themselves points of rupture and break - philosophy is a whole, it is one thing. That is, philosophy is a sort of river and Marx is a sort of beaver who built a dam which diverted the course of the whole river. (I’m probably reading more into Balibar’s metaphors than he would like or than he perhaps intended. In that case, I’ll just discard them and try to read Balibar as if he didn’t use such metaphors.)

A few more snarky remark on this issue before I drop it. First, the implied distinction between philosophy “as it was before” (4) and philosophy after Marx is in tension with the perspective laid out by the late Althusser, in which we can find and usefully read various writers in an alternative tradition of materialism (an alternative materialism to that which has sometimes taken that name). Second, if Marx’s writing constituted a sea change in philosophy, if Marx’s work was a sort of Marx-event which stands in relation “to the whole philosophical tradition” as a “revolutionary effect,” (5) then when precisely did this effect happen? At what point is Marx un-ignorable for philosophy? Is Balibar offering a temporal plane of pure ideas (the Marx effect appears in the terrain of intellect and the field is never the same again even if individual philosophers, traditions, and institutions fail to notice), a fuzzy but quantitative accounting (some number of readers and writers eventually found Marx important enough that he came to constitute a key event in intellectual history), or an individual relation to the text (anyone who reads this work and takes it seriously can not but have it change their orientation toward philosophical - and probably other - problems)? In all three cases and over all I’m sympathetic to the basic spirit here insofar as it is little more than a heartfelt honorific, but I see it as doing no other work than expressing that honorific.

Marx is really, really important.

Balibar moves on, identifying Marx’s work as characterized by ruptures, along the lines which Althusser made famous. This break marked “a point of no return, the origin of a growing distancing from the earlier theoretical humanism.” This break is “undeniable” to Balibar. (6.) I’m an agnostic here. I find aspects of so-called humanist and anti-humanist Marxisms that I’ve read appealing, and aspects of the so-called humanist and anti- or post-humanist Marx as well. Above all, I feel no need for larger perspective along the lines of a humanist/dialectical world-view or an alternative world-view on which to hang my communist outlook, except perhaps the occasional “conclusion without premisses.” (And as part of this I have a sneaking suspicion that the connection between or importance for the bits of Marx/ism that I like and these doctrines identified here as humanist, as well as those taken as an alternative for the humanist perspective, are likely themselves conclusions without premisses. Put differently, if the bits of Marx/ism I like form one point and the humanist and Althusserian/whatever doctrines from two other points, there seems to me to be more than one possible line that could be drawn connecting the points and no lines which are simply given in/by the points themselves.)

All of that said, I’m quite interested in Balibar’s characterization of Marx’s breaks, which he at least initially identifies with the larger social context in the years 1848 and 1871. Balibar suggests that disappointment over 1848 evoked a theoretical shudder in Marx, causing the “idea of the proletariat and its revolutionary mission to waver,” including the adandonment of “the notion of ‘permanent revolution’, which precisely expressed the idea of an imminent transition from class to classless society and also the corresponding political programme of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.” (8. This reminds me, I never finished Balibar’s book on the dictatorship of the proletariat. I should do that. I also realized in composing this post that my notes on Althusser have been pretty poor in the sense of being very unsystematic. He [and others] wrote on the proletarian dictatorship and for the life of me I can’t remember some of the key details . I should eventually finish that Kautksy stuff, and this stuff too.) The failure in 1848 also “meant the enduring eclipse (…) of the concept of ideology, which had only just been defined and scarcely been utilized. But it also led to the definition of a research programme bearing on the economic determination of political programmes and the long-term trends of social evolution. And it is at this point that Marx returns to the project of a critique of political economy, to recast its theoretical bases and carry it through to completion - at least up to the appearance of Volume 1 of Capital in 1867.” Part of this project involved “a strong desire to gain revenge upon victorious capitalism - and the anticipated conviction that he would so so - both by laying bare its secret mechanisms (mechanisms it did not itself understand) and demonstrating its inevitable collapse.” (8-9.)

That sounds brilliant to me, and suggests I should look for a thing or two to read on the history of 1848 and 1871 (Balibar doesn’t really get into 1871 in what I’ve read so far, so no notes.)

*

My negative remarks aside, among the things I like in the book is that Balibar cites a lot of material I’ve been meaning to read. I’ll be keeping track of that stuff here:

Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism
Lecourt, Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko
Stanley Moore, Three Tactics: The Background in Marx

Dietzgen
Lenin, Materialism and Emirio-Criticism, “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism”
Kautsky (”The Three Sources of Marxism), Labriola, Bukharin, Deborin, Stalin “Dialectical and Historical Materialism”