Abstract
On what common ground can Critical Theory (especially that of the first generation thinkers of the Frankfurt School), the state debate and the common struggles against capital’s massive worldwide advance meet? How can Wall Street, Syntagma Square and Tahrir Square come together with the Lacandon jungle? What does living among vampires, ghosts and werewolves mean in 2020? These and other paradoxes are developed in the recently published fourth volume of Open Marxism, 25 whole years after the publication of the third volume.
Everything and almost nothing has changed since 1995. The collapse of the existing socialism of that time may have destroyed capitalism’s opposite pole, but it also gave us the chance to free Marxism from the shackles of its authoritarian orthodoxy. At that time, capital seemed to be established as the sole overlord at the foreground of historical, political and social events, but its crises ever since have been the most severe during the last 100 years. While anti-capitalist struggles in 1995 may have withered away, they are now again resurgent, rising across the globe under the sole slogan ‘stop capitalism’.
The fourth volume of Open Marxism comes at a critical time and tries to express what remains elusive in a constantly evolving process of creating spaces, instances and opportunities for resisting capital. Using all the revolutionary experiences of the last 20 years, as well as the theoretical interventions of the intellectuals in this period, the volume aims to open a closed and identity-thinking world, recognizing the difficulty and melancholy resulting from such a marginal process.
Werner Bonefeld prefaces the volume. Placing it in the broad theoretical context of Western Marxism, he notes,
the point of Open Marxism is to interpret the preponderance of society as economic object – not to reject it abstractly and wilfully [. . .] the point of interpretation is to disclose its true content. Only society as subject has the capacity for deciphering and for refusing to accept the logic that holds sway in the economic object. Non-conformity is the signature of society as subject. (p. xiii)
The book consists of 11 chapters, which are divided into three separate themes, focusing on critical theory, the state, and democracy, respectively.
Leaving to last the first section, the relationship between Open Marxism and Critical Theory, I begin with the discussion on the state and democracy, important issues both in the context of Open Marxism and the modern anti-capitalist struggle. Both issues are understood in a dialectical context of interpretation based on the conception that reality appears as a constantly stirred relationship between essence and form. Essence is defined as human creative ability, the mental and manual human forces through which satisfaction of the most basic needs and desires is organized, such as food, water, shelter, love and understanding. Essence always appears, but in capitalism, it appears in a distorted, perverted and inverted way. Form (or appearance) is constituted by economic categories such as wage, rent, capital and constitutional rights, but also democracy and the state, which are of particular interest to us here.
In the Open Marxist analysis, capital is neither the fact of accumulated wealth nor is it the existence of a class opposed to the working class. It is a whole social relationship that is stirred and reproduced daily by each of us to the extent that we seek to survive by selling in the most efficient way the only commodity we have, our creativity or our concrete labor. We become the faithful vampire-servants of Nosferatu capital to the extent that we must, and indeed do, submit ourselves and our living labor to the logic that ‘time is money’. It is a social totality that drags everything into its path without leaving any point untouched from which we could develop a pure or sanctified critique of it.
The state and democracy, as forms, express this inverted and self-contradictory organized reality; constituting the need for money to multiply itself for its own particular purposes, transforming our life, practices, and our whole existence into something secondary, a mere sideshow. As Edith González points out in her contribution, the more our struggle is exhausted by our demands for more participatory and pluralistic democracy, the more capital remains secure and invulnerable to any kind of criticism. And then, what is the solution? What hopes do we have to protect our lives and our dignity against capital? How will that small fragility of capital make our reaction to it effective and materialistic emerge?
John Holloway contends that if capital is a totality of social relations that we reproduce, then the validity of our struggle against it can be established here. If we are the ones who stir it, then we are the ones who, by ceasing to reproduce it, lead capital to its crisis. This is an argument that, more than any other, has raised objections and criticisms against Open Marxism. In the Open Marxism volume, this critique is mostly expressed by Alfonso García Vela’s and Mario Schäbel’s contributions, by assessing how Open Marxists’ critical thinking follows and interacts with the critical theory of the first generation Frankfurt School thinkers, especially that of Theodor W. Adorno.
In short, both Vela and Schäbel argue that the Open Marxist position is not only naive and anti-dialectical but also does not follow the concept of dialectics, as expressed in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. Holloway’s concept that ‘we are capital’ creates a characteristic solipsism that leads to political voluntarism. Although Holloway and Open Marxism want to break with dominant identity-thinking logic; namely, the identity of substance and appearance, all they achieve is to create a new identity, within which the terms are simply reversed, that is, the priority of subject is recognized over that of the object. At this point, Schäbel contends that Holloway’s logic mostly quotes Marcuse’s critical theory, but not Adorno’s negative dialectics that acknowledges the priority of the objective structure over the subject. Schäbel also notes that even when the subjective origin of the structure is recognized, it is the latter (the structure as something objective) that, removed from the subject’s capacity to construct, traps it in a reality from which it seems unable to escape. In fact, the characteristic melancholy that pervades Adorno’s work must be identified here.
Holloway’s response to this critique is based on the Marxian distinction between Objekt and Gegenstand. By Objekt Holloway, like Marx, means the object as such, as something external to humans and their activity. Gegenstand, however, is a product of human practical activity, it is an object that is formed and captured in terms of the acting subject. In the Open Marxist analysis, if capital is understood as Objekt, that is, as analogous to what, according to Vela and Schäbel, Adorno understands as objective structures, then it leads us to doom and destruction, without allowing us to do anything about this. This is something we cannot tolerate and that is why we revolt against it. Our refusal to understand social relation-capital as Objekt is what motivates us to think, to dream, and to act in anti-authoritarian and therefore anti-capitalist ways. Recognizing the ‘priority of the object’, respectively, means that we respect the natural limits of the organization and execution of our activity; it means that we recognize ourselves as part of a set of natural conditions in which, while we may intervene, we can never entirely control.
In a nutshell, I contend that this fourth volume of Open Marxism fulfils a dual role; on one hand, it sums up the progress, theoretical and practical, made within the tradition of autonomist Marxism during the last two decades; on the other hand, it opens up fertile new fields of theoretical and practical activity, especially with regard to the fruitful development of the really rich tradition inherited to us by the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers.
Footnotes
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