Post-Marxism Post-Marxism is now a well-established theoretical position concerned with rescuing aspects of Marxist thought from the collapse of Marxism as a global cultural and political force. Marxism has come to be regarded by some as a discredited system of thought, carrying with it a burden of authoritarianism and totalitarian- ism which is at odds with the current commitment to cultural pluralism and libertarianism. This book traces the crystallisation of post-Marxism as a specific theoretical position in its own right and considers the role played in its development by poststructuralism, postmodernism and second-wave feminism. It examines the history of dissenting tendencies within the Marxist tradition, stretching from Rosa Luxemburg through the Frankfurt School to more recent theorists such as Barry Hindess, Paul Hirst, Rudolf Bahro, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and considers what the future prospects of post-Marxism are likely to be. A comprehensive account of the development of post-Marxist thought, Post- Marxism: An Intellectual History is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Politics, Philosophy, Literature, Sociology and Gender Studies. Stuart Sim is Professor of English Studies at the University of Sunderland. He has published extensively on cultural theory and continental philosophy. 1 Routledge studies in social and political thought 2 3 1 Hayek and After 15 Wittgenstein and the Idea of a 4 Hayekian liberalism as a research Critical Social Theory 5 programme A Critique of Giddens, Habermas 6 Jeremy Shearmur and Bhaskar 7 2 Conflicts in Social Science Nigel Pleasants 8 Edited by Anton van Harskamp 16 Marxism and Human Nature 9 3 Political Thought of André Gorz Sean Sayers 0 Adrian Little 17 Goffman and Social 11 4 Corruption, Capitalism and Organization 12 Democracy Studies in a sociological legacy 13 John Girling Edited by Greg Smith 5 Freedom and Culture in 18 Situating Hayek 14 Western Society Phenomenology and the neo-liberal 15 Hans Blokland project 16 6 Freedom in Economics Mark J. Smith 17 New perspectives in normative 19 The Reading of Theoretical Texts 18 analysis Peter Ekegren 19 Edited by Jean-François Laslier, Marc 20 The Nature of Capital 20 Fleurbaey, Nicolas Gravel and Alain Trannoy Marx after Foucault 21 7 Against Politics Richard Marsden 22 On government, anarchy and order 21 The Age of Chance 23 Anthony de Jasay Gambling in Western Culture 24 8 Max Weber and Michel Gerda Reith 25 Foucault 22 Reflexive Historical Sociology 26 Parallel life works Arpad Szakolczai 27 Arpad Szakolczai 23 Durkheim and Representations 28 9 The Political Economy of Civil Edited by W. S. F. Pickering 29 Society and Human Rights 24 The Social and Political 30 G.B. Madison Thought of Noam Chomsky 31 10 On Durkheim’s Elementary Alison Edgley 32 Forms of Religious Life 25 Hayek’s Liberalism and Its 33 Edited by W. S. F. Pickering, W. Watts Origins 34 Miller and N. J. Allen C. Petsoulas 11 Classical Individualism 26 Metaphor and the Dynamics 35 The supreme importance of each of Knowledge 36 human being Sabine Maasen and Peter Weingart 37 Tibor R. Machan 27 Living with Markets 38 12 The Age of Reasons Jeremy Shearmur 39 Quixotism, sentimentalism and 28 Durkheim’s Suicide 40 political economy in eighteenth- A Century of Research and Debate 41 century Britain Edited by W. S. F. Pickering and Geoffrey 42 Wendy Motooka Walford 43 13 Individualism in Modern Thought 29 Post-Marxism 44 From Adam Smith to Hayek An Intellectual History 45 Lorenzo Infantino Stuart Sim 46 14 Property and Power in Social 47 Theory 48 A study in intellectual rivalry 49 Dick Pels Post-Marxism An intellectual history Stuart Sim London and New York First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. © 2000 Stuart Sim All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Sim, Stuart. Post-Marxism : an intellectual history / Stuart Sim. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Post-communism. I. Title. HX44.5 .S53 2000 330.9–dc21 00-032312 ISBN 0–415–21814–4 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-203-18616-8 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-18739-3 (Glassbook Format) Contents Introduction: Marxism’s ‘disenchanted’ 1 1 Marxism in a ‘post-’ world 4 2 ‘An intellectual malady’? The Laclau–Mouffe affair (I) 12 3 ‘Without apologies’: The Laclau–Mouffe affair (II) 34 4 ‘Marxism is not a “Science of History”’: Testing the boundaries of Marxism 48 5 Post-Marxism before post-Marxism: (I) Luxemburg to the Frankfurt School 70 6 Post-Marxism before post-Marxism: (II) Hybridising Marxism 92 7 Constructing incredulity: (I) Postmodernism 104 8 Constructing incredulity: (II) Feminism 125 9 An open universe? Postmodern science and the Marxist dialectic 140 10 ‘Not show biz’: Pluralist politics and the emancipation of critique 164 Notes 172 Bibliography 189 Index 195 Introduction Marxism’s ‘disenchanted’ Post-Marxism is now a well-established theoretical position that, as in the work of such major theorists as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, attempts to rescue aspects of Marxist thought from the collapse of Marxism as a global cultural and political force in the later twentieth century, and reorient them to take on new meaning within a rapidly changing cultural climate. Marxism is now generally regarded in the West as a discredited system of thought, carrying with it a burden of authoritarianism and totalitarianism at odds with the current commitment (theoretical as well as political) to cultural pluralism and libertarianism. This study traces the crystallisation of post-Marxism as a specific theoretical position in its own right in the work of Laclau and Mouffe, going on to consider how such a devel- opment came to be all but necessary in the wake of the growth of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and second-wave feminism (with a certain amount of help from movements within the classical Marxist tradition itself). It examines, in other words, the growth of both post-Marxism (those thinkers who, however regretfully, have rejected their Marxist past) and post-Marxism (those who, like Laclau and Mouffe, have set out to reformulate Marxist theory to encompass new movements such as poststructuralism, postmodernism, and second-wave feminism). The distinction is one that Laclau and Mouffe themselves venture in their best-known, and highly controversial work, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985), in order to insist that Marxism still does inform their thought in a critical manner: ‘But if our intellectual project in this book is post-Marxist, it is evidently also post-Marxist’.1 Marxism is, at the very least, the point of departure for their theoretical speculations. Post-Marxist in this study, however, will have the harder- edged interpretation of ‘rejection’, rather than simply ‘going beyond’, as in Laclau and Mouffe’s usage. The narrative presented here works as follows: after situating Marxism and post- Marxism in today’s cultural climate, with specific reference to Laclau and Mouffe and the reception accorded Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, we proceed to consider whether we can identify a tradition of scepticism within Marxism itself. In the first instance this means exploring closely the work of Laclau and Mouffe’s contem- poraries Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst (and others in their orbit) to observe Marxism being subjected to uncompromising critique by professed adherents, the logical outcome of which would seem to be post-Marxism. Figures like Hindess and 2 Introduction: Marxism’s ‘disenchanted’ Hirst in England, and André Gorz and Rudolf Bahro on the Continent, reveal the considerable degree of unease Marxists themselves are beginning to feel about their theoretical heritage by the closing decades of the twentieth century. Then we delve further back in time to assess whether we can identify, as it were, a post-Marxism at work within classical Marxism. This involves searching for post-Marxist tenden- cies within the work of such theorists as Lukács, Luxemburg, the Frankfurt School, Bloch, Sartre, and, somewhat unwittingly perhaps, Althusser. We then move on to consider the growing disenchantment being expressed towards Marxism from the postmodernist and feminist camps from the 1960s onwards, before confronting classical Marxist principles with what has been dubbed ‘postmodern’ scientific thought – quantum mechanics, chaos theory, complexity theory, the anthropic principle, etc. Developments in the latter area would seem to undermine Marxism in its nineteenth-century scientific guise (the teleological dialectic with which it is traditionally associated, for example), while simultaneously offering new possibilities for reformulating the dialectic in a non-teleological manner which jettisons the deterministic side of Marxist thought. If the universe really is, as much current scientific thought suggests, ‘open’ as far as future developments go, then there is once again a real point to human action. The nature of that openness can be gleaned from the comments of physicists such as Paul Davies: there is still a sense in which human mind and society may represent only an intermediate stage on the ladder of organizational progress in the cosmos. To borrow a phrase from Louise Young, the universe is as yet ‘unfinished’. We find ourselves living at an epoch only a few billion years after the creation.