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Reexaming the Political Ontology of Class: an Investigation of a Central Marxist Concept

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Reexaming the Political Ontology of Class: an Investigation of a Central Marxist Concept The University of Maine DigitalCommons@UMaine Honors College Spring 5-2016 Reexaming the Political Ontology of Class: An Investigation of a Central Marxist Concept Ciarán Coyle University of Maine Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/honors Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Coyle, Ciarán, "Reexaming the Political Ontology of Class: An Investigation of a Central Marxist Concept" (2016). Honors College. 376. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/honors/376 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UMaine. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors College by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UMaine. For more information, please contact [email protected]. REEXAMING THE POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF CLASS: AN INVESTIGATION OF A CENTRAL MARXIST CONCEPT by Ciarán Coyle A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for a Degree with Honors (Philosophy) The Honors College University of Maine May 2016 Advisory Committee: Kirsten Jacobson, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Advisor Michael Howard, Professor of Philosophy Nico Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Husson University; Preceptor, Honors College Michael Lang, Associate Professor of History Nathan Stormer, Professor of Communications and Journalism Abstract This thesis attempted to critically examine the concept of class as it has been developed and deployed by European Marxism. The central question that guided this investigation was: “what constitutes the being of a class?” In course of developing an answer to this ontological question, this thesis approached the problem of class from two different methodological perspectives. The first part of this thesis attempted to understand class via a brief examination of the history of the concept as it appears in the writing of Marxist theorists from the original writings of Marx and Engels to the more-politically oriented theories of Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. The examination of the writing of Marx and Engels revealed that the concept of class is ambiguous at the origins of Marxist theory. The study of Luxemburg and Lenin attempted to demonstrate how early 20th century Marxism tried to make sense of this ambiguity by fixing the essence of classes to an autonomous and determinate sphere of economic reality. The second part of this thesis approached the problem of the ontology of class through social theory. It picked up where part 1 left off, with a critique of the theory of economic determinism that was developed by 20th century Marxism. After rejecting this understanding of social reality, part 2 attempted to develop an alternative social theory from Marxist principles in order to find a new ontological foundation for classes. Contents 1. Introduction…….…………………………………...1 Part 1: Class through History 2. Ambiguity at the Origins………………..…….….....8 I. Economic Duality of Master and Slave…......….........8 II. The Dual Proletariat................................................13 III. The Problem of Class Consciousness…………….15 IV. Multiplication of Classes....................….…...........18 V. Theoretical Dissolution……………………………24 VI. Conceptual Multiplicity……………………..….…26 3. The Economic Plane of Consistency........................27 I. Luxemburg and Praxis…....……..…………............28 II. Lenin and Representation A. The Vanguard Party…………………………......32 B. Revolution against Economism?...........................35 III. Economic Reality and Class Identity…...………...39 Part 2: Class through Society 4. Crisis of Base and Superstructure….………………43 I. Base and Superstructure…………………..….….…45 II. What is Capital? A. The Importance of the Text……………………...48 B. The Commodity in the Market and the Factory…49 C. Fetishism………………….…....….………….....54 III. Critiques and Responses A. Production as the Economic Real?......................56 B. Fetish and Fantasy……………………………...58 IV. MΔ’s Mirror and Origin: Surplus-Labor………...63 V. A Final Critique: A Defense of History…………...67 VI. Dissolution of Base and Superstructure………….71 5. A New Topography of Social Reality..………..….73 I. The Social/Societal Distinction………….……....…74 II. Nature……………………………………….…….780 III. Notes Towards a New Topography………….…...83 IV. State, Economy, and Sociality.……........................85 V. From Class to Mass to Multitude.…....…...….........90 VI. A Brief Refrain…………………….……………...94 VII. Iteration – What is Capital (Crisis)?.....................97 VIII. The New Proletariat…………………………….104 iii 6. Conclusion…...…….……………….........................106 Bibliography……………………..…...…………...…116 Reading List……………….…….……………..…....120 Author’s Biography………………………………....145 iv 1. Introduction At the heart of Marxist theory is the idea that the character and development of every society is determined by a class-struggle. To formulate this idea simply would be to state that society splits into specific classes via the economic division of labor and that these classes correspond to specific strata and hierarchical positions. The ruling class of every epoch forces other classes to toil in order to produce wealth that is then appropriated by that ruling class. In this way, every society is structured around specific relations of class domination and exploitation. These relations are not fixed or static; they are determined by a struggle for power between classes as each ruling class attempts to maintain its position while the exploited class seeks to overthrow the societal order that oppresses it and establish a new one in its image. In this political theory, classes are the agents of political and societal transformation; they are the privileged subjects of history. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels formulated the basis for this theory of class- struggle in the mid-19th century, when capitalism had only just emerged as a 1 dominant economic mode of production. Given their declaration, in The Communist Manifesto, that capitalism “cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society,” one ought to assume that the social reality in which these thinkers produced their works differs greatly from our own. 1 Given these historico-social transformations, I think that the concept of class, which forms such a central part of Marxist theory, should be re- examined. Moreover the re-examination of the concept of class is almost made into a necessity when one considers the ways in which the development of history has departed from the predictions of Marx and Engels. These authors asserted that the laws of the development of capitalism ensured the increasing polarization of society into two classes–bourgeoisie (capitalists) and proletariat (workers)–and that this self-movement of capitalism ensured the victory of the proletariat, which would inevitably make up a majority of the population of capitalist society. This prophesy clearly does not match the class schema today, given the development of a large “middle-class” in industrial and post-industrial economies of the global north.2 While the reassessment of the class divisions of capitalist societies today is already an ongoing and vigorous project within sociology at present, the goal of my thesis is to develop an ontological examination of the concept class within the 1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, edit. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 476. 2 For relatively recent sociological analyses of class division of modern capitalism, see Erik Olen Wright et. al., The Debate on Classes (London: Verso, 1989). The example of the middle class is taken from pages 3-8 of Wright’s introductory essay titled “A General Framework for the Analysis of Class Structure.” 2 Marxist tradition. The question that drives the following analyses will be “what is the ‘classness’ of class?”, or, “what defines a class qua class?” In other words, the following analyses will examine the specificity of the being of classes. In order to develop an answer to this question, the first part of this work will scrutinize the concept of class as it is presented in the early history of Marxist theory. This return to the origins of Marxist theory will reveal that the question of the concept of classes is still fairly ambiguous at the outset, despite the fact that the political project guided by this theory relies so heavily on the concept of the class-struggle. So, in this thesis, I intend to investigate the nature of class and evaluate the utility of this concept in the development of Marxist political theory. I will approach the question of the classness of class through the following steps. In part 1, I will argue that the question of the being of classes was never properly formulated in the Marxist tradition. This argument will continue in chapter 2, through a rereading of selected writings of Marx and Engels and will develop the thesis that the term “class” designates a multiplicity of conceptual beings; I will ultimately argue that the term has no singular referent. In chapter 3, I will examine two prominent Marxist political theorists of the early 20th century– Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin–and will examine how their political proposals and ideas attempt to make sense of the ambiguous concept of class by grounding it in an autonomous and determinate economic sphere of reality. The goal of these chapters is not only to lend some ontological specificity to the concept of class
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