In Defense of a Non-Marxist Marx (齐泽克《Living in the End Times》第三章第二节）

Although Postone is highly critical of Althusser, he, like the French philosopher, dismisses the early “humanist” Marx as deeply flawed, but posits the crucial “epistemological break” even later than Althusser does, locating it in the mid-1850s, with Marx’s return to the “critique of political economy” through a renewed reading of Hegel’s Science of Logic. It is only from this moment onwards that Marx effectively overcame his first formulation of “Marxism” (or what later became codified as the predominant form thereof) with its crude (even if superficially “dialecticized”) dichotomy of “economic base” and legal and ideological “superstructure,” and its naïve historicist evolutionism. The latter relied implicitly on the ahistorical absolutization of labor (the process of material production and reproduction of life) as the “key” to all other phenomena, and found its canonical expression in the “Indian Summer” text of the early Marx, the famous “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).7 After the “break,” however, gone are all the Feuerbachian symmetrical reversals (“the dead rule over the living instead of ...”), and gone too is the naïve opposition between the “real life process” and “mere speculation.”8 Postone’s main reproach to “traditional” Marxist theory is that, at its heart, it relies on

a transhistorical—and commonsensical—understanding of labor as an activity mediating humans and nature that transforms matter in a goal-directed manner and is a condition of social life. Labor, so understood, is posited as the source of wealth in all societies and as that which underlies processes of social constitution; it constitutes what is universal and truly social. In capitalism, however, labor is hindered by particularistic and fragmenting relations from becoming fully realized. Emancipation, then, is realized in a social form where transhistorical “labor,” freed from the fetters of the market and private property, has openly emerged as the regulating principle of society. (This notion, of course, is bound to that of socialist revolution as the “self-realization” of the proletariat.)9

Especially noteworthy is Postone’s detailed analysis of how even the most critical “Western Marxists,” who clearly saw the need to rethink Marxism in order to grasp twentieth-century capitalism, nonetheless retained its traditional core, the evolutionist-ahistorical notion of labor and productive process:in the face of historical developments such as the triumph of National Socialism, the victory of Stalinism, and the general increase of state control in the West, Max Horkheimer came to the conclusion in the 1930s that what earlier had characterized capitalism—the market and private property—no longer were its essential organizing principles ... Horkheimer argued that the structural contradiction of capitalism had been overcome; society was now directly constituted by labor. Far from signifying emancipation, however, this development had led to an even greater degree of unfreedom in the form of a new technocratic form of domination. This, however, indicated, according to Horkheimer, that labor (which he continued to conceptualize in traditional, trans-historical terms) could not be considered the basis of emancipation but, rather, should be grasped as the source of technocratic domination. Capitalist society, in his analysis, no longer possessed a structural contradiction; it had become one-dimensional—a society governed by instrumental rationality without any possibility of fundamental critique and transformation.10

What this means is that the Heideggerian dialectic-of-Enlightenment topic of technocratic “instrumental reason,” of domination grounded in the very notion of labor, of the post-political rule of labor (“administration of things”), and so on, should all be rejected as false names for the problem of how to think the failure of the Marxist revolutionary emancipatory project. Sharing with Marxism the premise that the post-capitalist society is “a social form where trans-historical ‘labor,’ freed from the fetters of the market and private property, has openly emerged as the regulating principle of society,” the dialectic of Enlightenment merely reads it as a catastrophe rather than as emancipation: “You wanted to abolish capitalism and install the direct rule of labor? Then don’t complain about totalitarianism—you got what you wanted!” This topic is therefore like a false screen, an all-too-easy direct solution, which obfuscates the true problem: the new social forms of domination-unfreedom in modern capitalism, but also in “totalitarianisms”—“totalitarianism” is not the rule of “instrumental reason.” One should correct Postone himself here when he writes that

the rise and fall of the USSR was intrinsically related to the rise and fall of state-centric capitalism. The historical transformations of recent decades suggest that the Soviet Union was very much part of a larger historical configuration of the capitalist social formation, however great the hostility between the USSR and Western capitalist countries had been.11

One popular intellectual parlor game among converted ex-Leftists is to identify the historical factors which paved the way for the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century: Marx? The Jacobins? Rousseau? Christianity? Plato (“from Plato to NATO ...”)? In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer provide the most radical (self-relating) answer to this question, identifying the moment at which things took a wrong turn with the emergence of humanity, of human civilization, itself: already in “primitive” magic one can recognize the elementary contours of the “instrumental reason” which culminates in the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. But one should be precise here and insist on the predicate “capitalist”: it is not that capitalism and communism are “metaphysically the same,” both expressions of instrumental reason, of the rule of labor, and so on; it is rather that, in the concrete totality of today’s global society, capitalism is the determining factor, so that even its historically specific negation in “Really Existing Socialism” is part of the properly capitalist dynamic. That is to say, whence comes the Stalinist drive-to-expand, the incessant push to increase productivity, to further “develop” the scope and quality of production? Here we should correct Heidegger: it comes not from some general will-to-power or will-to-technological-domination, but from the inherent structure of capitalist reproduction which can survive only through its incessant expansion and for which this ever-expanding reproduction, not some final state, is itself the only true goal of the entire movement. When Marx describes the capitalist dynamic of expansive reproduction, he locates the roots of the very “progressivism” to which he himself often falls prey (such as when he defines communism as the society in which the endless development of human potential will become an end-in-itself).

In what, then, does Marx’s “epistemological break,” which begins with the Grundrisse manuscripts and finds its ultimate expression in Capital, consist? Let us compare the starting point of Capital with the starting point of Marx’s most-detailed presentation of his earlier view, in the first part of The German Ideology. In what is presented as a self-evident reference to “real life-process” as opposed to ideological phantasmagorias, ahistorical ideology reigns at its purest:

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way ... Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.12

This materialist approach is then aggressively opposed to idealist mystification:

In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.13

This attitude culminates in a hilariously aggressive comparison: philosophy is seen as having the same relationship to the study of real life as masturbation has to the real sexual act. Here, however, problems begin: what Marx discovered with his problematic of “commodity fetishism” is a phantasmagoria or illusion which cannot simply be dismissed as a secondary reflection, because it is operative at the very heart of the “real production process.” Note the very beginning of the subchapter on commodity fetishism in Capital: “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”14 Marx does not claim, in the supposedly “Marxist” manner of The German Ideology, that critical analysis should demonstrate how a commodity—what appears a mysterious theological entity—emerged out of the “ordinary” real life-process; he claims, on the contrary, that the task of critical analysis is to unearth the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” in what appears at first sight just an ordinary object. Commodity fetishism (our belief that commodities are magical objects, endowed with inherent metaphysical powers) is not located in our minds, in the way we (mis)perceive reality, but in our social reality itself.15 As Kojin Karatani has perceptively noted, the circle is thereby closed: if Marx had started with the premise that the critique of religion is the beginning of all critique, and then went on to the critique of philosophy, of the state, and so forth, ending with the critique of political economy, this last brought him back to the starting point, to the “religious” metaphysical moment at work at the very heart of the most “earthly” economic activity. It is against the background of this shift that one should read the beginning of Volume I of Capital:

“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation,’ its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.”16

Marx then moves on to the double nature of a commodity (use-value and exchange-value, etc.), gradually unveiling the complex synchronous network of capitalist society. Even here, however, there are occasional regressions back to his earlier “Marxism,” most explicitly (as noted by some perspicuous critics) in the deceptively commonsensical definitions of labor such as are given at the beginning of Chapter 7 of Capital:

The labour-process, resolved as above into its simple elementary factors, is human action with a view to the production of use-values, appropriation of natural substances to human requirements; it is the necessary condition for effecting exchange of matter between man and Nature; it is the everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase. It was, therefore, not necessary to represent our labourer in connection with other labourers; man and his labour on one side, Nature and its materials on the other, sufficed. As the taste of the porridge does not tell you who grew the oats, no more does this simple process tell you of itself what are the social conditions under which it is taking place, whether under the slave-owner’s brutal lash, or the anxious eye of the capitalist, whether Cincinnatus carries it on in tilling his modest farm or a savage in killing wild animals with stones.17

Something is wrong with the process of abstraction here: “It was, therefore, not necessary to represent our labourer in connection with other labourers; man and his labour on one side, Nature and its materials on the other, sufficed.” Really? Is not every production process by definition social? If we want to grasp the labor process in general, should we not link it to “society in general”? Perhaps the key to what is correct and what is mistaken in Marx’s Capital resides in the relationship between two “wrong” abstractions: from use-value to exchange-value, and from social production to asocial labor. The abstraction of labor into an asocial form is ideological in the strict sense: it misrecognizes its own socio-historical conditions: it is only with capitalist society that the Robinsonian category of abstract labor as asocial emerges. This abstraction is not an innocent conceptual mistake, but has a crucial social content: it directly grounds the technocratic strain in Marx’s vision of communism as a society in which the production process is dominated by the “general intellect.”18

Perhaps the clearest example of the gap that separates Capital from The German Ideology occurs apropos money. In Capital, Marx analyses money in three stages: he begins with the development of the value-form, that is with the analysis of the formal determinations of value as a relationship between commodities; only then, after the concept of money is deployed “in itself,” does he move on to money in the exchange process, that is to the activity of commodity owners. Finally, he presents the three functions of money: as measure of value, as means of circulation, and as actual money (which, again, functions in three ways: as treasure, payment means, and world money). The inner logic of the three functions of money is that of the Lacanian triad of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real: Marx begins with “ideal” money (to measure the value of a commodity, one does not need money, it is enough to imagine a certain sum of money which expresses the value of the commodity in question); he then passes to symbolic money (as a means of circulation, i.e., in order to buy and sell, we do not need money with real value [gold], since its representatives [banknotes] are good enough); but for treasure and so forth we need real money. The contrast with the methodology of The German Ideology could not be clearer: Marx does not begin with “real, active men” and “their real life-process,” but with the pure analysis of formal determinations—only at the end does he reach what “real people” do with money.19

However, Marx did not systematically and explicitly develop this key structuring role of the commodity form as the historical-transcendental principle of the social totality; indeed, one could argue that he was not even fully aware of this crucial breakthrough in his mature work—he was doing something new and unheard-of, and his awareness of its significance probably remained at a “Marxist” level. One should mention here, as an interesting curiosity, Engels’s attempt in Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State to relativize or historicize the centrality of the material production process by way of supplementing labor (the production of things) with kinship (the form of the social organization of the production of humans):

According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life. But this itself is of a twofold character. On the one hand, the production of the means of subsistence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools requisite therefore; on the other, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social institutions under which men of a definite historical epoch and of a definite country live are conditioned by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor, on the one hand, and of the family, on the other. The less the development of labor, and the more limited its volume of production and, therefore, the wealth of society, the more preponderatingly does the social order appear to be dominated by ties of sex.20

Engels is here developing a motif found already in The German Ideology, where he and Marx claim that

men, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other men, to propagate their kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family ... The production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship. By social we understand the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. It follows from this that a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a “productive force.”21

(One should also note the uncannily similar passage from Civilization and its Discontents, where Freud claims that civilization comprises two fundamental aspects: all the knowledge and productive forces we develop to dominate external nature and gain from it adequate material products for our subsistence, and the network of relations which regulate how people deal with each other—or, as an American vulgarizer condensed Freud in a amusingly ideological way: “There are two businesses, the business of making money and the business of making love.”)

Both Stalinist orthodoxy and critical feminism immediately recognized the explosive potential of these lines from Engels’s book. Back in the 1970s and ’80s, many feminists sought to identify the family as part of the mode of production, and to show how the very production of gender had to be understood as part of the “production of human beings themselves,” according to norms that reproduced the heterosexually normative family. Much less well known, but no less important, is how Stalinism reacted to this passage: in the short official preface to all Stalinist editions of the book, there is a warning to readers that, in the above-quoted lines, Engels “allows an inaccuracy” and makes a claim that contradicts not only the fundamental Marxist thesis on the determining role of the mode of (material) production, but even the main body of the book itself. It would be easy to make fun of Stalinist “dogmatism” here, but there is nevertheless a genuine problem with Engels’s passage—no wonder even Lukács and all “non-dogmatic” Hegelian Marxists did not know what to do with it. Engels sees a problem, but offers only a pseudo-solution in the very terms which created the problem itself—the “production of people” reduces its specificity to another species of production.22

We should add here that not only are there “regressions” to “Marxism” in Marx’s late texts, there are also, in his texts from before the late 1850s, momentary passages which point forward, towards the post-Marxist Marx. Above and beyond the obvious cases—for example, Marx’s great analyses of the nineteenth-century revolutions (The Eighteenth Brumaire, and so on)—there are even some unexpected pearls in Poverty of Philosophy, where Marx presents an amusingly malicious portrait of Hegelian idealist speculation:

Impersonal reason having outside of itself neither ground upon which to stand, nor object with which it can be composed, finds itself forced to make a somersault in posing, opposing and composing itself—position, opposition, composition. To speak Greek, we have the thesis, antithesis and the synthesis. As to those who are not acquainted with Hegelian language, we would say to them in sacramental formula, affirmation, negation, and negation of the negation. That is what it means to speak in this way. It is certainly not Hebrew, so as not to displease M. Proudhon; but it is the language of this reason so pure, separated from the individual. Instead of the ordinary individual, with his ordinary manner of speaking and thinking, we have nothing but this ordinary manner pure and simple, minus the individual.23

Although this passage belongs to the early “Marxist” Marx, the last proposition announces a different logic, totally at odds with the young Marx’s logic (or, rather, rhetoric) of symmetrical reversals: instead of symmetrically inverting the first thesis, the second part repeats it, just cutting it short: “Instead of the ordinary individual, with his ordinary manner of speaking and thinking, we have”—not (as expected) an extraordinary individual (say, the transcendental Subject or the Hegelian Spirit), but—“nothing but this ordinary manner pure and simple, minus the individual.”

But let us return to Postone: he is at his best when, against the formalism of “production,” he demonstrates how the standpoint of the capitalist concrete-historical “totality” is missed by theories which try to capture the determining feature of our world with notions like “risk” or “indeterminacy”:

To the degree we choose to use “indeterminacy” as a critical social category, then, it should be as a goal of social and political action rather than as an ontological characteristic of social life. (The latter is how it tends to be presented in poststructuralist thought, which can be regarded as a reified response to a reified understanding of historical necessity.) Positions that ontologize historical indeterminacy emphasize that freedom and contingency are related. However, they overlook the constraints oncontingency exerted by capital as a structuring form of social life and are, for this reason, ultimately inadequate as critical theories of the present.24

Perhaps a more precise formulation would have been appropriate here: the experience of contingency or indeterminacy as a fundamental feature of our lives is the very form of capitalist domination, the social effect of the global rule of capital. The preponderance of indeterminacy is conditioned by the new, third, stage of “post-Fordist capitalism.” Here, however, Postone may be corrected on two points. First, he sometimes seems to regress from history to historicism. For properly historical thought, as opposed to historicism, there is no contradiction between the claim that “all history hitherto is the history of class struggle” and the claim that the “bourgeoisie is the first class in history.” All civilized societies were class societies, but prior to capitalism, their class structure was distorted by a network of other hierarchical orders (castes, estates, and so forth)—only with capitalism, when individuals are formally free and equal, deprived of all traditional hierarchical links, does the class structure appear “as such.” It is in this (non-teleological) sense that, for Marx, the anatomy of man is key to the anatomy of the ape:

Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allow insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it, etc. Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known.25

As for the abstraction of class, the same holds for the abstraction of labor, whose status is also historical:

Labour seems a quite simple category. The conception of labour in this general form—as labour as such—is also immeasurably old. Nevertheless, when it is economically conceived in this simplicity, “labour” is as modern a category as are the relations which create this simple abstraction ... Indifference towards any specific kind of labour presupposes a very developed totality of real kinds of labour, of which no single one is any longer predominant. As a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears as common to many, to all. Then it ceases to be thinkable in a particular form alone. On the other side, this abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours. Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only the category, labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form. Such astate of affairs is at its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society—in the United States. Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the category “labour,” “labour as such,” labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice.26

Marx is not slipping here into the easy historicism that relativizes each universal category, rather, he is asking a much more precise Hegelian question: when do “the most general abstractions,” which are as such valid for all times, “arise,” when do they pass from the In-itself to the For-itself, when do they “become true in practice”? There is no teleology here, the effect of teleology is strictly retroactive: once capitalism arrives (emerging in a wholly contingent way), it provides a universal key for all other formations.

The second critical point to make with regard to Postone is that he dismisses all too quickly the class struggle as a component of the “Marxist” determinist-evolutionary view (taken to the point of ridicule in Stalinism): the social meaning of every position in the superstructure (state, law, art, philosophy ...) depends on which class position they “reflect.” But “class struggle” in the young Lukács is precisely the transversal which undermines economic determinism: it stands for the dimension of politics at the heart of the economic. When Postone interprets the commodity form as a kind of historically specific transcendental a priori which structures the whole of social life, up to and including ideology, branding it in all its aspects with the “antinomic opposition” between “the freely self-determining individual and society as an extrinsic sphere of objective necessity,” he all too quickly reduces the dimension of class struggle (social antagonism) to an ontic phenomenon which is secondary with regard to the commodity form. He thereby fails to see how class struggle is not a positive social phenomenon, an ontic component of objective social reality: it designates the very limit of social objectivity, the point at which subjective engagement co-determines what appears as social reality.