Interview with Werner Bonefeld: Open Marxism and the Critique of Society

Against the backdrop of the collapse of traditional Marxist certainties during the early 1990s, most notably with the demise of the Soviet Union, key figures associated with open Marxism sought both to free Marx from the state socialist orthodoxy and to rediscover marginalized Marxist traditions and arguments ranging from council communism to the early Frankfurt School. ¹ Adorno’s negative dialectics proved decisive for its theoretical development. Open Marxism opposed those who regarded Marx as formulating a positive economic theory in which categories such as ‘value’ are treated as technical and measurable quantities determined by physical labour inputs. It also rejected traditional readings of Adorno as a cultural critic of the administered world and of the consumer industry. Instead, it read his negative dialectics as a Marxist critique of society. For open Marxism, the economic categories or structures constitute the social forms and processes of historically specific social relations. Its conception of economic nature as an ‘inverted’ social nature is perhaps best expressed with the following quotation from Herbert Marcuse: in the form of the economic object, ‘the constitution of the world occurs behind the backs of the individuals; yet it is their work’ (Marcuse, 1988: 151).

In contrast to traditional socialist arguments about the economic forces and advocacy of state socialism as a rational alternative to capitalism, open Marxism rejects Marxian economics as a contradiction in terms because it naturalises the forms and processes of historically specific social relations, and thus accepts as universally valid what Marx’s critique sought to decipher on a social basis. Open Marxism took its methodological cue from Marx’s historical materialism, which rejects the idea that materialism amounts to a scientific analysis that discovers a purportedly given economic nature. Instead, Marx’s materialism demands ‘the opposite, i.e., to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which they have become apotheosized’ (Marx, 1990: 494). Open Marxism, therefore, agrees with Adorno’s (1990) characterization of dialectical materialism as a ‘perverter of Marxian motives’ for excluding the historical process (p. 355). Instead, dialectical materialism transforms the ‘law of capitalist accumulation . . . into a pretended law of nature’ (Adorno, 2006: 118).

In the former West Germany, Adorno’s students – including Alfred Schmidt, Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt – developed Adorno’s negative dialectics as a Marxian critique of the economic object, which led to the development of the so-called neue Marx-Lektüre or New Reading of Marx. ² With Adorno, this approach argued that bourgeois society exists in the independent form of the economic object, that the economic object manifests an inverted sociability that is hostile to the needs of participating individuals, and finally that a definite logic holds sway in society as a process of economic valorisation. Open Marxism argues similarly but rejects the logical character of the New Reading of Marx for mirroring the systemic character of its critical object. In contrast, open Marxism insists that the categorical critique of capitalism falls short if it ignores the lived experience of its class-divided individuals. Following Adorno, Baumann (2022: 66) notes how capitalist society becomes directly perceptible ‘where it hurts’. Under capitalism despite an accumulation of enormous wealth, a whole class of individuals struggles to make ends meet. For open Marxism, class struggle is not something positive. Rather, it is about access to ‘crude material things’ (Walter Benjamin in Bonefeld, 2014: 225). Class struggle, therefore, belongs to the concept of the false society.

Bonefeld (2016) understands critical social theory as a ‘negative dialectics of economic objectivity’. He argues that human suffering constitutes the secret history of society as a process of real economic abstraction (Bonefeld, 2023). His approach expounds Adorno’s (1990) insight (pp. 17–18) that to ‘lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth’. In this context, suffering is not an existential term of pure subjective feeling. Rather, it is an objectively mediated term. ‘For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject: its most subjective experience, its expression, is objectively conveyed’ (Adorno, 1990: 18). Bonefeld’s open Marxism maintains that a definite logic holds sway in society as a process of real economic abstraction. For him, the critique of political economy consists in deciphering the economic categories as the economic forms of definite social relations. Their social validity is not objectively given. Rather, it manifests itself through struggles for self-preservation. Adorno’s (1989) insight (p. 275) that the class-divided individuals ‘owe their life to what is being done to them’ is central to open Marxism’s critique of the relations of economic objectivity as relations of the sheer unrest of life.

For over 30 years, the view of Marx’s critique as a critical social theory has been debated and furthered in the pages of notable journals and publications. Journals associated with the Conference for Socialist Economists (CSE) played an important initial role. The arguments in the CSE’s main journal, Capital & Class, were developed in Common Sense, the publication of the conference’s former Edinburgh section. This effort was continued in three volumes of Open Marxism, which were published in the 1990s. A fourth volume was published in 2019. Significant contributions to the dissemination of Marx’s critique as a critical social theory have appeared in the form of the three-volume SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, and in the publications of the Bloomsbury series Critical Theory and the Critique of Society. In the last two decades, international and Spanish-language journals such as Constelaciones: revista de teoría crítica and Bajo el volcán have also played a significant role in this connection.

The following interview was conducted on the eve of the publication of Werner Bonefeld’s monograph, A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion: Wealth, Suffering, Negation (2023). The latter represents the sequel to Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason (2014).

Alex Alvarez Taylor (AAT):

The early volumes of Open Marxism engaged critically with questions of formalism, scientism and of how to properly periodise capitalism. These issues remain topical. Why might this be and what is meant precisely by the adjective ‘open’? ³

Werner Bonefeld (WB):

The title Open Marxism derived from a book published by Mandel and Agnoli (1980). Agnoli endorsed an open Marxism as both a critique of the Marxist traditions that are represented in the book by Mandel and as a designation for a heterodox Marxism. Instead of a Marxian economics, he put forward one powerful injunction: develop Marx’s critique of political economy as a critique of the economic categories. Against the grain of the naturalization of the economic categories in the orthodox traditions, the heterodox traditions associated with critical theory and open Marxism conceives of them as historically specific forms of definite social relations. It therefore rejects the traditional conception of a socialist labour economy as a moral rational accommodation to the capitalist labour organization.

Typically, the orthodox Marxist traditions criticise capitalism from the standpoint of labour. They argue for socialism as a perfected mode of labouring in which the economic interests of workers are met. Its standpoint critique is founded on a transhistorical conception of labour economy that refers to the human metabolism with nature, abstractly conceived. It views capitalism as a historically overdetermined manifestation of the natural necessity of labour, in which labour is exploited for profit and in which the development of the productive forces of labour is crisis prone. In capitalism the development of the forces of production is constrained by the capitalist relations of production becoming too small and narrow for them, thereby creating the objective conditions for a transition to socialism. The origin of this argument lies in classical political economy and its stage theory of history. Within the Marxist tradition it was popularized by Friedrich Engels’ Anti-Dühring.

However, Marx’s critique of political economy rejects the classical materialism of nature and society as abstract and ahistorical. In fact, his critique rejects the core argument of the orthodox tradition, according to which every capitalist economic category ‘can be reduced to a natural process’ and that socialism will ‘achieve the conscious reconstruction of the value form through collective action’, as argued, for example, by Harvey (2012: 13; 2018: 38). Marx conceived of his historical materialism as follows: ‘it is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly kernel of the misty creations of religion than to do the opposite, i.e., to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized’. Marx continues: ‘The latter method is the only materialist one, and therefore the only scientific one’. For him, the former method belongs to the ‘abstract materialism of the natural sciences, which excludes the historical process’ (Marx, 1990: 494). The orthodox conception of a dialectic between nature and society treats history as if it were an objectively unfolding event. It is heedless of the historically specific conditions that govern the social relations in the inner bond of their own capitalist world. Critically conceived, historical materialism amounts to a critical theory of economic objectivity. Society is governed by the movement of unfathomable economic quantities, which tends to deny an entire class of people access to the means of subsistence in the blink of an eye. Yet what manifests in society as economic object is the social practice of the sheer unrest of life in sustaining the strength of the link to social wealth.

The adjective ‘open’ was meant to signal rejection of the ontological straitjacket of the Marxist orthodoxy and to shine a light on and lend a voice to the social relations. Open Marxism’s early critiques remain topical because the traditional critiques of capitalist society still prevail. At best, they analyse capitalist society to comprehend its political, economic, and social truth from various standpoints, including the standpoints of labour and the norms of equality, justice, and freedom. The standpoint critiques express the subjective truth of bourgeois society. They identify the shortcomings of capitalist society, and they thereby establish what society lacks in terms of the moral rationality of its labour organization, its social equality and distributive justice, and they therefore proclaim, often with moral indignation, what needs to be done to overcome deplorable situations – what praxis must realize is a more perfect ‘version of industrial society’ (Wolfgang Streeck), and it must overcome all forms of discrimination and exclusion, and it must overcome poverty by putting money into the pockets of workers and it must provide real job opportunities by making money invest in workers (rather than in financial services), and it must also safeguard the environment from destruction. ⁴ The identified shortcomings and dangers that lay in wait are real, they blight the life of a whole class of people and might lead to environmental catastrophe. Who would reject proposals to mitigate real shortcomings?

In contrast, open Marxism scrutinizes the untruth of the capitalist society. It amounts to an attempt at thinking in and through its objective character. Subjective critique identifies social misery as a contingent social situation that can be remedied through political intervention to assure universal standards of humanity, abstractly conceived. Undoubtedly, alleviating human misery is a necessity, and in capitalism an enduring one. In contrast, the critical reason of the heterodox traditions of critical theory and open Marxism is objective, that is, instead of analysing the given human-social situations, it is a critique of their constitutive condition. It asks: what is the ‘real of capital’ that turns the struggles for progressive ends into alternative strategies of capitalist development? It does not run with the flow of the world. Rather, it tries to think against the flow. It examines the social logic governing capitalist relations and asks what must be abolished for a society of the free and equal.

For its critics, the heterodox Marxist traditions, from critical theory to open Marxism, are reprehensible because they allegedly lack a political dimension. True, they refuse to become of a piece with the kind of politics that the critique of political economy is supposed to leave behind. It is equally true that existing relations cause immense human suffering and destruction – mitigation is therefore welcome. However, the deplorable social situation does not come about because of some intrinsic economic difficulties or hard-nosed class politics. It is brought about by capitalist social relations.

The existing social relations are seductive – they conjure up the idea of the bourgeois individual as an independent doer and creator of civilization. They make critics on the side of subjective reason believe that they have what it takes to make capitalism meet the needs of its propertyless surplus value producers, humanizing exploitation, and civilizing domination if you will. Of course, a civilized regulation of capitalist society and the achievement of humane labour relations are preferable to their authoritarian management. The bright side view is attractive because it allows the critics to see themselves as progressive ‘doers’ and ‘civilizers’ who, given the chance, would use this politics and this intervention to overcome the identified shortcomings. The bright side view does not look into the eye of the storm, and never fails to impress, because it identifies real shortcomings and offers to fix them for good. This is not an argument against well-meaning politicians genuinely devoted to ameliorating real hardships and protecting the environment, on the contrary. Rather, it is an argument against a moralizing politics of noise, its identitarianism and narcissism, as well as its know-it-all politics of conformist rebellion.

AAT:

Critical theory recognizes the social significance of our living ‘aesthetic’ faculties, of our capacity to listen, to feel pain, to empathise with others – even to engage actively in culture and society. Does open Marxism regard ‘aesthetic’ or ‘lived’ experience as contributing to a properly negative and ‘open’ method of social critique?

WB:

A theory that treats society as a system without a subject ends up treating individuals as objects of political machination. Instead of thinking through society to lend suffering a voice, it rejects such an undertaking as a distraction to the scientific task at hand, which is to formulate political solutions for overcoming identified problems in a perfected mode of labour economy. Speaking on behalf of the exploited and dominated, it proposes redemption through what Althusser calls a class politics of practical humanism. It makes ideological claims, asserts to have the requisite technical expertise for transforming the labour economy for the greater good of society in socialism, and proposes organizational action on behalf of humanity, abstractly understood. ⁵

What sort of theory is needed to articulate the objectivity of a reified society that weighs down on the social individuals like a torture instrument, splintering them into atomistic price takers? ⁶ The idea that a socialist critique of capitalism amounts to a social theory without a subject is absurd. To answer your question, open Marxism is either a critical theory of lived experience, or it is just another standpoint critique that identifies miserable situations as fixable shortcomings without deciphering the social objectivity of the economic categories. The standpoint critique of scientific Marxism describes abstractly what it naturalizes, and it supports its self-presentation as the progressive consciousness of society and its history, and as such it offers itself as a redeemer of the human condition. If Marx (1990) is right to say that ‘capital is not a thing, but social relations between persons which is mediated through things’, then capital is really just a name for a particular kind of social relations and their lived experience (p. 932).

The idea that society is a process without a subject accepts and confirms its reified character. For a critical social theory reification is of secondary importance. Much more important are the social relations that assume a relationship between economic things. What is reified and what therefore appears in reification with a price tag? What appears is the needy individual as economic personification, struggling for access to material things to satisfy her needs. It is the case that the acting individuals are incorporated in the spirit of money, as it were. However, and contrary to perception, money does not talk. Rather, social individuals speak in and through money as the independent power of their own social relations. Money does not care about inflation or deflation, whether it belongs to the few or is desired by the many, whether it yields living offspring or crashes. The validity of money is a social validity, and its power to compel individuals to the point of madness and despair is socially constituted. The capitalist cares for profit, money as more money, as he must to avoid competitive erosion and bankruptcy. Free labourers care for money, too. They struggle for money to make a living. For them to obtain and maintain wage-based employment, their living labour must produce profit for the buyer of their labour power. The alternatives are bleak. To be a redundant worker is a far greater misfortune than being an exploited worker. Class struggle is dictated by hunger. Capitalism hurts. In its entirety, the economic world is a world of definite forms of human social practice. The crucial category is the struggle for self-preservation. It furnishes society in the form of the ‘money subject’ with a cold, calculating consciousness. To come back to your question, unfulfilled human needs lead to the struggle over capitalism. To exclude the lived experience of capitalism from the concept of capital is akin to either moralizing the class struggle or rejecting the class struggle as wrong-headed spontaneity.

AAT:

Citing Max Horkheimer, Memos (2018) writes that ‘tension characterizes all the concepts of the critical way of thinking’ (p. 1324). Marx’s critical concept of the fetish-character of the bourgeois relations of production is central to open Marxism and critical theory. It describes how in capitalist society, because of the way that production-for-exchange actually takes place, dynamic social relations between humans really do present themselves in inverted form, as static relations between things. Human agency thus comes to be dominated by a structure that is its own creation. Nevertheless, many authors have criticized the Frankfurt School for promoting a closed view of fetishism as an impenetrable ‘steely construction’ that deprives political actors and individual subjects of all agency. ⁷ In what sense is open Marxism’s concept of fetishism a dynamic and open-ended one?

WB:

According to Christos Memos’ quotation it is both open and closed. It is closed because the fetishism of commodities is real. It really is the case that social relations assume the form of a relationship between things, and they are therefore governed by the logic that holds sway in society as a process mediated through economic things, which makes of social individuals personifications of economic categories. It is open, however, because the nature of the economic object is a social nature. After all, social relations are the ones that assume the form of self-moving economic forces. The world of the commodity fetish is hostile to the social individual, yet its shape remains human. Or following Marcuse, the world manifests itself behind the backs of individuals struggling to make a living under the objective weight of economic forces; yet it is their world, and it is their social practice of making ends meet, the struggle for self-preservation, that gives society as process its validity and dynamic. ⁸ They are governed by the product of their own hands. Therefore, society as process is a stahlhartes Gehäuse. Yet, it is nothing without the reified practice of the individuals, and their spontaneity, whose world it is. They do not live in economic being. They live in social being, and the circumstance that their social being manifests itself to them in the form of uncontrollable economic forces entails the critique of the economy as a critique of society.

AAT:

Generally, ‘traditional’ Marxists have criticized ‘heterodox’ authors for being uninterested in such classic mainstays as the state and strategy. Open Marxism is an exception. Building on Johannes Agnoli, the German state debates and on the late Simon Clarke’s ground-breaking work on ‘social form’, open Marxism develops a form-analytic state theory that challenges traditional conceptions of politics and the state. ⁹ Has this latter reading played an important role in your work on ordoliberalism, for example?

WB:

In short, ‘yes’. I came to the study of ordoliberalism against the background of the crisis of 2008. There was a lot of commentary then about the (terminal) crisis of neoliberalism and of the neoliberal state, and that a new, socially responsible, state-based capitalism was emerging from the ashes of the neoliberal phase of capitalist development. Some commentators identified this new capitalism with the ordoliberal idea of a social market economy. This analysis was short-lived and soon replaced by the critique of the politics of austerity, which was also identified with ordoliberalism, especially in Europe during the Eurozone crisis. So, within a very short period, political analysis identified a crisis of the neoliberal state, the emergence of a social market ordoliberal state, and then the coming to the fore of an ordoliberal austerity state. It seemed as if every twist and turn in capitalist development required the identification of a new form of state organization to specify assumed conjunctural models of political economy. This of course was not new – in my own time, the Fordist state transformed into a post-Fordist state, the corporatist Keynesian welfare state into a neoliberal state, and then there is the endless debate about the retreat of the state and the return of the state vis-à-vis the market. In these debates a conception of the capitalist state is conspicuous by its absence. The founding ordoliberal thinkers are interesting for several reasons. For one, they understand, to paraphrase Adam Smith, political economy as a branch of the science of the legislator and the statesman. They reasserted this insight during a most profound crisis of capitalism in the 1920s/1930s. However blinkered their conception of state and economy, they express the principle idea of the form of the state as the concentrated force and organized power of capitalist society. Without the power of the state, capitalist economy will descend into bloodshed – and it does not really matter whether the form of the state is identified as Fordist or neoliberal, Keynesian or liberal, etc., since in either case, the adjective attributes to the state what belongs to it, that is, the exercise of rule-making and rule-preserving violence to preserve an order of capitalist freedom and equality. However, what is equally true, the analytical identifications of the state as, say, either Keynesian or neoliberal in character, fail to conceptualize the political in political economy. This is why the critics of the so-called neoliberal state tend to endorse the so-called Keynesian welfare state of old as the democratic alternative to the current situation, and this in spite of their earlier critique of the Keynesian welfare state as a form of capitalist domination.

AAT:

Open Marxism inherits early critical theory’s radical rejection of positivism. The first three volumes questioned structuralist forms of Marxism, rational choice Marxism, positivist sociology and critical realism, among others. What kinds of positivist theories should open Marxists be examining today?

WB:

Positivism is about finding law-like regularities in human history, which politically minded positivists under the heading of structuralism wish to tweak for the sake of this or that social interest. So one could say that the positivist premise of the contemporary analysis of financialization is its identification of productive labour as an enduring necessity that has allegedly been corrupted by financialization to the detriment of a good order of society. According to this critique of financialization, the productive economy needs to be restored to serve the democratic aspirations of social majorities, who for their social reproduction depend on achieving wage-based employment. The state is thus called upon to make money invest in jobs for workers and to secure their employment. The positivist character of this argument and its approach to society has given up on the question of the social constitution of reality. Instead, it takes for granted the existence of a working class and argues on its behalf. In the case of the financialization debate, it is premised on the view that workers must be enabled to work for their supper, and that money needs to be invested in workers for that purpose. By no longer asking about the social constitution of the economic forms, this approach to financialization analyses society akin to what is quantitative, measurable, and empirically observable, criticising society for its moral failings, for allowing the poor to fall into destitution, while the rich get richer. The conceptual insight that a class of dispossessed labourers belongs to the concept of capitalist wealth is a non-topic.

On the one hand, there is the critique of positivism as an abstract theory seemingly grounded in the research methods of the natural sciences, one that analyses society accordingly. Closely related is the critique of the moral model, which aims at perfecting society on behalf of the wage-labouring class. On the other, however, the rejection of positivism is not as forceful as your question seems to imply. The positive in positivism is important for critical social theory. It is opposed to the idealism of a subjective reason that, arguing for social justice and improving the lot of the poor, fails to grasp the categorical character of poverty. That is, poverty belongs to the conceptuality of capitalist wealth. To use Adorno’s memorable formulation, those without independent means will have to trade their labour power for a wage, so as to ‘dodge the freedom to starve’. ¹⁰ Contrary to metaphysics and contemporary idealism, open Marxism ‘posits’ the existing, actual relations. Whilst positivism as a scientific philosophy takes the existing relations for granted and seeks to express their enduring characteristics in the capitalist labour economy, critical theory is empirical social research that deciphers the social nature of the given relations. Ontological structures cannot be changed, on the pain of ruin one has to adapt to them. Only because of its social nature can capitalism be overcome.

AAT:

The Romantic or pre-Marxian critique of capitalist civilization, what open Marxism has termed ‘alienated labour in revolt’, is blamed for an aestheticizing and moralizing approach to social critique that leads to political dead-ends. ¹¹ What, if anything, can be rescued from the Romantic critique of bourgeois modernity, which in its left-wing form encompasses a rich emancipatory tradition ranging from utopian socialism to anarcho-syndicalism?

WB:

Earlier I quoted from Marx’s Capital to say, first, that ‘capital is not a thing, but social relations between people mediated through things’, and second, that historical materialist critique ‘develops from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized’. Here lies the answer to your question. Founding society anew, human emancipation is not a matter of rearranging relations between things. Society as a process of economic things is the objective appearance of historically specific social relations. Class struggle is struggle over and against the conditions that cause human suffering. Should the society of the free and equal emerge out of these struggles, it will have established entirely new social relations in which the social individuals are no longer governed by (real) abstractions, but in which they govern themselves, developing the social forces directly as their own forces. The emancipatory traditions that you refer and allude to have historically been the laboratory of a new humanity in struggle against the existing social relations. Today they remain marginal and the communist council of the oppressed has largely been forgotten, mainly due to the success of the Bolshevik revolution that was premised on their destruction. These traditions inspire the conception of an open Marxism.

AAT:

Many Marxists argue that Marx’s destructive or critical moment is simply part of a broader constructive effort to develop a novel kind of social science. They argue that if Marxists do not beat bourgeois science on its own ‘quantitative’ and ‘thingly’ terrain, if they do not articulate an alternative macroeconomic theory, then other competing forces on the Right will. What do you make of this call to treat capitalism not only as a set of specific relations, but also as an object of mathematical and technical measurement, manipulation and appropriation?

WB:

Amongst many other things, the last century also saw a huge experiment in the application of a so-called Marxian macroeconomics. I am sure there are some here today eager and ready to try again. In the contemporary context, should China be regarded as an exemplary case of what a Marxian macroeconomics can achieve? I am sure some do. We should know the bad. We should also know how to avoid it. Given the poverty of conditions, there is an urgent need to mobilize to avert the worst. Any success in obtaining welfare concessions is welcome and the prevention of further environmental destruction is urgent. I referred to the politics of noise earlier. In the context of the Eurozone crisis, Syriza was loudly condemned for its apparent ‘failure’ to maintain its opposition to austerity – here was the party of anti-austerity, success was in reach until impotent politicians betrayed the movement for change by giving in to the demands of the Troika. This point of view is based on the idea that bourgeois society harbours within itself the promise of a freedom from want. According to this idea, the world market price of wheat does not matter. What matters is the election of progressive politicians who, once in office, stick to their socialist manifesto and make good on their promises for a progressive labour economy. Leaving aside the idea of socialism as a neo-mercantilist inter-state system between nations (so as to prevent its descent from humanity to nationality to bestiality in a socialism in one country), the recurring tale concerning the truth of the capitalist labour economy does not transform that truth into a critique. The true moment of this tale consists in seeing the poverty of conditions, the daily struggle of society’s surplus value producers to make a living. Its untruth consists in the promise that things could be different if only the forces of practical humanism were in charge. What remains? The future of capitalism has not been written, nor has its ending, which instead of a society of communist individuals, might as easily usher in a dictatorial autocracy or a theocracy. The latter alternatives seem more likely. The lure of dystopia, what to avoid, is strong because it is marked by the trappings of the present. We do not know the good.