Defending of a Broad View of Marxist Praxis
Cicheria’s comment was one staunchly critical of the notion of “going beyond” class politics (understood here as essentially Marxist critique of political economy). This notion, as Cicheria noted, is indeed one that has enormous purchase in the liberal-leftish academy—for all of the wrong reasons. Cicerchia’s critique, with which I entirely agree in the specificity the listener is given, is two-pronged: first, in the United States at the present time, there simply is no “class politics” to “go beyond.” Union density is dipping into the single digits; Marxism and socialism are marginal and academic, unlike in countries where militant Labor parties present a real and consistent challenge to a capitalist status quo (and even unlike the United States in an earlier time, particularly the 1930s.) The second prong is that the notion of “going beyond” marginal, moribund class politics takes the form today of increasingly hyper-identitarian, essentialist academic culture warfare—in short, it does not earnestly derive from a desire to cover all of the bases of subjugation, including class, but rather from a desire to obscure, marginalize or simply prohibit talk of class (hence the tedious use of the “class reductionist” epithet.)
This is true of the way this concept is generally cashed out, but I feel compelled to argue that it is very much the case that the ethical and political critiques Marxists employ must include social phenomena that have little or perhaps nothing to do with class in any necessary, obvious, or even plausible way. This is assuming that we adopt the Marxian understanding of class, which Cicerchia does. That is to say, class is defined by one’s relationship to the means of production, to the economic engine of society. What this looks like is that there is a class whose only really marketable possession is their labor power (their capacity to work), and who therefore sell their labor under coercive conditions and are exploited as they labor upon means of production in which they have no organic stake and produce materials to which they have no access, all in exchange for bare survival. On the other hand, there is a class who owns the means of production and purchases labor-power to be exploited, and who enrich themselves on the poorly-compensated toil of the former class.
This is a picture of society that still, as a basic formula, still holds. The important question is: what is bad about this? Anyone who genuinely believes there is something wrong with this scheme, I think, believes this for essentially the same correct reason(s): that is to say, it is unfair, and it is simply wrong to exploit human beings for one’s own enrichment. Why is it wrong to exploit people? Wherein lies the injustice or unfairness? I hazard that it lies in the simple, correct intuition against domination, against being controlled by an outside force. People value being able to determine their own lives—to be free. Freedom obviously is positive as well as negative here, and also obviously includes the very material freedom from fear of starvation or displacement, et cetera.
Reflecting on the recent assaults on Gaza by Israel, with the full-throated and deep-pocketed support of the United States, I fail to see what necessarily is beneficial—much less urgently important—in attempting to understand this clear, unambiguous moral travesty in properly Marxist “materialist” terms. Surely it would be possible to do so, and additively fruitful as one particular analysis: one could, and some have, focus on the baseline, nuts and bolts economic logic behind the US’s geopolitical alliances and strategies in the Mideast and come out with a sophisticated, if quite complex, Marxist analysis of the crisis in the region. There is a lot there. But it is far from obvious why this approach would be particularly edifying in view of the ethical goal: emancipating the Palestinian victims from the yoke of a regime bent on their violent displacement or extermination. The fact that some niche angles front-loading class exploitation can be gotten out of a specialized analysis of this horrific perpetual warfare fails to convince that such angles are the most expedient, illuminating, or ethically relevant.
Another example. Early in undergrad, I took an introductory Women’s Studies course. We watched a very illuminating documentary called Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women. Jean Kilbourne, the narrator/lecturer in the film, points out a stark divide in the way that men and women’s bodies are portrayed in an advertisement that was roughly the same otherwise. The women, she pointed out correctly, were made to look “ridiculous”—crawling on the floor, splayed out hypersexually, standing on their heads. The men were invariably in dignified, upright postures, smiling confidently and healthily while the women had awkwardly parted lips and stared faux-lustily into the camera. Of course, this was an illustration—a quite affecting one—of how women are sexually objectified, and the film as well as its four sequels drove this point home starkly.
What are sometimes called “radical feminists,” late second-wave feminists—in particular Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon—spent their careers showing how women are subjugated particularly in the sexual arena. Rape was a consistent focus, but so were all of the cultural mores that correlate with the abuse and assault of women’s bodies—what we today call “rape culture,” but which for them extended further than current analysis generally permits and indicted mostly the whole of the standard of “femininity.” Femininity, for them, was designed and enforced for men, quite often at the expense of women’s self-worth, safety, and even lives. Radical feminists today have gotten a bad name, with some merit, as some contemporary strains of this mode of critique have adopted vitriolic anti-transgender bigotry in place of persistent analyses of ongoing objectification and, for lack of a better term, rape culture. (For what it’s worth, Dworkin appears not to have said anything about transgender people in her writing, and MacKinnon has semi-recently clarified her affirmative and inclusive position on transgender women.)
At the same time, Marxist political-economic forms of feminist critique also exist and are generally quite compelling. Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser are two exemplary representatives of feminists who focus on what is sometimes called “social reproduction.” In essence, they apply Marxist critiques of labor exploitation to women-dominated unpaid familial domestic labor. While in the United States the male single-breadwinner model no longer dominates, it did in the time of early social reproduction theory, but more importantly, it indeed still dominates in many, many other parts of the world. The “reproduction” part means that by caring for the home, cooking for the family (notably the husband), women have been tasked with literally reproducing labor-power, regenerating the worker in the family and thus ultimately serving up their own (unpaid) labor as the condition of possibility for the compensated labor-power of the man.
Both of these two analyses—the Marxist-feminism and the feminism focused on women’s sexual subjugation—seem intuitively true and are borne out in experience. Both are clearly serious problems. However, it stretches credulity to make the Dworkin-MacKinnon insights into matters of political-economy critique. Again, there are probably ways in which one could do so that may have some additive effect on the discourse around the issue. The economy dominates everything, so surely there is an “economic” contour in the mix to be explored. But the ethical problems raised in their writings and in those of other feminists from that tradition are urgently important, and no part of the urgency or importance seems to stem from any phenomenon on which Marxist political-economy critique focuses.
Yet I believe it is critically important—and critically important as Marxists—to be acutely attentive to these issues and other persistent forms of subjugation, domination, and coerced unfreedom. To do so demonstrates a commitment to the principle behind socialism’s opposition to exploitation, and to fail to heed these concerns appears to violate that principle. It cuts off the logical application at an arbitrary point. This is especially true historically: clearly various forms of brutal exploitation (including slavery of manifold kinds) and subjugation are to be found throughout all of recorded history. Obviously I’m not arguing that Marxists commit to memory the entirety of recorded history, but an important point arises here: Marxist class analysis pertains specifically to capitalism, and when it doesn’t, it pertains to important economic antecedents to capitalism. It pertains specifically to capitalism—a system decisively able to be faithfully periodized within history, and thus one that did not always exist—because capitalism is the only system which contains the social-economic categories with which it deals.
In short, it’s incumbent on principled Marxists to vigorously oppose and fight against any system or social phenomenon which offends against the baseline values that a non-capitalist society is meant to reintroduce to human life, even if that phenomenon is hardly most fruitfully or even plausibly analyzed in terms of canonically Marxist concepts and categories. Vigorous opposition of this sort is emphatically not deflationary on Marxism—as the cynical use of “go beyond” so often is—but is importantly additive to Marxist praxis. At the same time, I should add, the deflationary impulse can be strong, when priorities appear to conflict (cf. any DSA meeting). Therefore it’s critically important to reject the “class reductionist” smear and to remain committed, as Marxists, to class struggle. But committing to liberation struggles that aren’t clearly linked to class struggle, and doing so without attempting to perform some strenuous mathematics in order to square the commitment with Marxist critique of political economy, is not cheating on Marxism. It’s a demonstration of love, for a future world in which the dynamic of domination that Marxist analyses lay bare is eradicated for good.
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