Marxism and Democratic Theory

...The positions and concepts required to deal with contemporary problems of democracy are more likely to emerge from encounters between unorthodox Marxisms (quasi-, post-, and so on) and non-Marxist democratic theories...

...Their very familiarity means doubt about whether communitarian formulas are feasible or attractive in an advanced society, ruling out any easy Marxian appropriation of communitarian views...

...Althusser ruthlessly criticized the humanist and existentialist Marxisms of the postwar years for treating social life as merely the expression of essential principles...

...His closing announcement of a Marxist commitment is unconvincing by his own standards...

...He rejected any faith in either a communist future or a true science of history and proposed treating power as primordial and creative...

...Even a generous view of the merits of his technological determinism will not certify his history of the future...

...As few Marxists continue to claim that a scientific knowledge of history allows them to reject the relevance of the problems which preoccupy "bourgeois" democrats, there has been a falling away of barriers between Marxists (also semi-Marxists, post-Marxists, and so on) and various strands of contemporary democratic theory...

...The promise of this logic (not the first time for such a cycle) is a fruitful convergence among Marxist, democratic, and liberal theories concerned with a democratic politics in advanced industrial societies...

...In the dense politics of contemporary political theory, centrist or conservative liberals often attack quasi-Marxist democratic theory as utopian, hyperradical, and vague...

...Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987...

...At the same time, orthodox Marxists denounce renegacy and impugn its motives, as in the bullying critiques of Laclau and Mouffe's work published in New Left Review...

...His views of knowledge and agency were said to amount to a cynical instrumentalism: Those with access to Marxist science were entitled to use their privileged knowledge to lead others to make the right history...

...The claim that political appeals succeed on their merits, simply on the basis of their depth and persuasiveness, seems wishful...

...In such regimes, rights are prescribed extensively, and institutions are charged with protecting them...

...But such points are not really the point...

...Rights and Conditions A number of important recent works whose points of reference are more or less Marxist have shown a willingness to take up old questions freshly and to address normative issues...

...Later Przeworski indignantly replied that he was not a Leninist, yet still declined to locate himself politically either with respect to the Marxist or any other tradition in a clear way...

...Such views reject what are seen as rigid and rationalistic conceptions of the subject—in their place, some offer a view of the subject as more flexible and spontaneous in its forms, while others pursue their critique until the subject has become an arbitrary, transient point whose tenuous unity lies mainly in the forces of power that construct it...

...Yet poststructuralist accounts are useful in clearing away the confusions of orthodox Marxism...

...Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol...

...Marxists could intervene in —deconstruct...

...When relations between rights and conditions are sharply interrogated and democratic initiatives are proposed, such efforts can be stigmatized as naive, even antipolitical and illiberal insofar as they head down the slippery slope to Marxist instrumentalism...

...At second glance, however, similarities between communitarianism and orthodox Marxism seem troubling...

...Naming names, Cohen and some of his colleagues need to be arguing with Dworkin and Rawls about relations among various equalities and between rights and conditions...

...When—as in this society and most like it now —class relations appear as only one among many important political themes, neoorthodoxy has little of normative interest to say...

...To renew orthodoxy either as economic determinism or a reduction of politics to class usually ends up positing a normative stance in favor of "the working class...

...Since World War II the most ambitious and influential effort at renewal was made by the French theorist Louis Althusser...

...The work of John Roemer and several associates enters the same terrain as that of Rawls and Robert Nozick in analyzing relations between equality and liberty...

...For example, within liberalism, contractarian positions have recently drawn much criticism as too abstract, procedural, and individualistic, not paying enough attention to the concrete commitments and experiences from which individuals draw their political vocabulary and their capacity to engage in politics...

...This leaves him with little to say about the problems condensed in the term "rights" except that they are located within "basic bourgeois ideology...

...Although a liberal regime of rights does not equal an authoritarian regime, class relations so constrain the exercise of rights that liberalism's core claims cannot be sustained...

...There is a promising junction where Marxist and liberal-democratic theories can meet, argue, and perhaps undergo major changes...

...His arguments are insufficiently sensitive to problems involving the means of equalization, and he does not specify how much equalization of conditions is politically required...

...thus the problem shifts to analyzing how best to achieve the new society, given a zero-sum struggle for power among differently motivated classes...

...The costs of what will be a series of sometimes awkward and uncertain encounters—disciplinary confusion, uncertainty about where to place new positions, bitter attacks from orthodox Marxists and conservative liberals—seem modest and well worth paying...

...Marxism as an integral theory of the historical present and future is unconvincing even before one judges more limited questions, such as whether Marxist accounts of politics overstate the role of economic variables...

...Beyond Orthodoxy Not many Marxists are willing to dispose of all these problems by pronouncing that history is indeed moving toward communism, thus allowing one to insist on the primacy of class relations amid admittedly complex conditions...

...Althusser's theoretical influence within French Marxism made the overall failure of his project very important...

...Frank Cunningham, Democratic Theory and Socialism (New York...

...from the right, a threat to our children's education...

...The preceding account suggests that just about everything of merit to be gained by debating Marxist orthodoxy has been accomplished...

...Political uncertainty partly expresses theoretical doubt...

...Nonetheless, the weight of such orthodoxy has led many writers, such as Steven Lukes, to feel obligated to write the same argument again and again: Marx had contextual as well as theoretical reasons for rejecting normative debate, but those reasons probably do not hold up today...

...In such comical exchanges, contemporary Marxists have to guess each other's politics...

...John Keane, Public Life and Late Capitalism: Toward a Socialist Theory of Democracy (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984...

...Foucault, Knowledge/Power, ed...

...Much liberal-democratic theory now treats relations between political rights and social and political conditions as problematic...

...In these dialogues (some underway, others prospective), those whose referents are Marxist can help shape new democratic positions, as unexpected convergences (and disagreements) occur...

...When Cohen treats normative issues as effects of the development of productive forces, the question of "rights" in contemporary capitalism appears only in terms of power relations...

...Positing a logic of history through which the working class will lead the world to communism now seems unbearably naive, for reasons that range from the bleak course of "state socialist" regimes in the East to deep socioeconomic and political transformations in the West...

...The general prescription of the part of Anglo-American liberal theory that has moved toward an "advanced" social liberalism is a market-based economy regulated by a state charged with extensive social welfare provision...

...The modern problem with Marxism is the lack of credibility of its basic vision...

...Nicos Poulantzas strained at the limits of economic determinism and challenged Althusser's reassertion of Leninist verities about the state and democracy...

...Whether or not this was aim, Elster's work helps close the books on neoorthodox Marxism...

...This abstracting of rights from conditions privileges the first of two key questions: What social and political conditions will secure a stable regime of rights...

...What replaces the classical vision in which the role of the working class as the agent of transformation is given by socioeconomic relations...

...If all that had appeared were a technically impressive restatement of orthodox Marxism, the subject would be of no interest and Allan Bloom or William Bennett would have little to worry about...

...Choices are made through social conflict...

...The separate arguments of the classical synthesis still have value, but reasonable uncertainties about each point interact to multiply doubts...

...If the normative vision was vague and even apolitical, Marxism claimed that refusing to specify the future marked it off from utopian speculation...

...I (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984...

...Where the political scene is dominated by class conflict, this approach at least brushes against real choices...

...New Debates Recent significant Marx-oriented work in political and social theory converges with liberal and democratic theories on common problems about how to define contemporary relations between rights and conditions...

...These formulations gained a shaky analytical and normative unity by viewing history as leading inevitably toward communism...

...Unger's recent work has been received this way...

...On some accounts, there is nothing good in this story—from the left, it means the depoliticizing of Marx...

...These and other attempts at institutional design abandon the Marxist conventions by which such efforts were long rejected...

...Within contemporary political theory, one of several serious efforts along the latter lines was Richard Miller's reconstruction of Marx (Analyzing Marx), in which relations of production play a central role...

...Choosing One's Fight Hybrid efforts have met considerable criticism...

...For those whose points of reference are mainly Marxist and socialist, taking both questions seriously means directly engaging in normative discourse...

...If one translates community as class, claims about anchoring knowledge in collective experience, tying individual life plans to collective aspirations, and defining substantive goals with reference to communal needs are quite familiar...

...Yet there is much uncertainty about what to put in place of this faith...

...Morality" is deemed to entail only claims that apply equally to all individuals, are generalizable across societies, and are acceptable to all rational subjects...

...Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982...

...such debate, their own critical goals being already given by class interests...

...If "Marxism" means full adherence to the classical synthesis, its endless obituaries would be warranted...

...SUMMER • 1989 • 349...

...Some of the current debate just restates old accusations, but there is also real dialogue and genuine movement...

...Instead, societies are complex structures whose elements are significantly autonomous...

...The point here is that failed efforts at a new Marxist orthodoxy have opened the way to a creative interaction among theories often considered incompatible...

...Here a productive encounter with Marxist theory can occur as both traditions face the problem of specifying the conditions in which bearers of rights can function with the autonomy and dignity those rights are supposed to register...

...To the extent that liberals recognize these realities as theoretically salient, and Marxists decline simply to say "socialism" as a way of addressing them, there is considerable potential 346 • DISSENT Political Theory for a new dialogue...

...The normative horizon was a society without a state in this sense, a harmonious, self-governing unity...

...G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978...

...Cohen had little to say about politics in his Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense...

...Recent efforts at democratic design by Frank Cunningham, David Held, and John Keane address the institutional forms of democratic control in advanced societies...

...More modest efforts to renew orthodoxy have not fared better...

...By this stringent standard, the pragmatic and contextual elements of Marxism disqualify it...

...And meeting their challenges may compel Laclau and Mouffe to examine how the relatively stable political identities are achieved that seem still to anchor democratic politics...

...Little reflection on current political and social life is needed to make such a position untenable, because its minimum condition—that it be possible analytically and empirically to specify the revolutionary subject in relatively precise terms—is not met...

...When liberal theorists acknowledge the second question—what makes rights meaningful as capacities for autonomous action?—it opens inquiry into the political effects of political and socioeconomic relations...

...Cohen posits a general human inclination toward rationality and self-improvement and combines this with his technological determinism to assert that history is a natural process Books Discussed in This Essay Louis Althusser et al., Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1970...

...the state maintained exploitative class relations...

...Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979...

...Yet Marxisms proliferate as fast as modifiers (quasi-, post-, and so on) are found...

...Issues about the contemporary meaning of democracy persistently arise for both Marxist and liberal theories, given the decline of legislatures and mass parties, the rise of conservative antistatism, and wide changes in social life that both weaken conventional political actors and encourage new forces...

...Their thorough critique of Marxist orthodoxy opens a space between determinism and a purely voluntaristic account of politics...

...If treating politics as class conflict was too crude, Marxism claimed at least to know the key historical process...

...thus politics matters for social development by expressing conflicts rooted in relations of production...

...Marxists still charge liberal theorists with failing to take seriously the gulf between political rights and actual power relations...

...The first question alone—how can a regime of rights be sustained?—can allow a complacent claim that political and socioeconomic inequalities do not jeopardize rights, now redefined as state guarantees that actions by specified agents will not meet overt violence...

...His notion of economic "determination in the last instance" was criticized as another reduction of politics and culture to the economy...

...As the limits to reform within contemporary capitalism are uncertain, and in the United States not close at hand, it is reasonable to propose deep changes in work or the form of political institutions without wholly prejudging when major elements of such changes could be implemented...

...Roberto Unger, Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory, Part I: False Necessity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987...

...Michel Foucault radicalized Althusser's antihumanism...

...His work was rooted in a political culture for which Marxism was far more important than it has ever been in the United States...

...Miller proposed (by way of claiming that Marx favored it) a "humane nonmorality...

...Roemer argues for a much more thorough equality of conditions than Rawls, claiming it is necessary to realize the core promises of liberal theory about individual autonomy and opportunity...

...How those who take the Marxist tradition as a major referent should assess communitarian arguments exemplifies the many questions where debate can become lively and productive...

...In the politics of theory, the lack of definitive solutions means that conditional advances often derive from choices about whom to argue with...

...To choose such debates is to pose a political and theoretical objective: to redraw boundaries so that major parts of the Marxist tradition (Gramscian, for short) and the more democratic strands of the liberal-democratic tradition are drawn together by common concerns and overlapping substantive positions...

...When Miller applied this view to debates about the state and the distribution of political power, however, the results broke no new ground and supplied little evidence of the value of his approach...

...What social and political conditions allow a regime of rights to sustain autonomy and develop capacities for self-determination...

...These days there are few Althusserians...

...But he was inferring this, not quoting directly...

...given the huge stakes, those engaged in class conflict were obligated to use any means necessary...

...Miller's nonmorality is humane in positing a loosely structured catalogue of general goods that most people prefer...

...The authors start from Gramsci to discuss political identities and alliances...

...taking up problems of institutional design, rather than postponing them toward an indefinite benign future...

...Indeed, such appreciation of the arguments of Sandel or Charles Taylor has occurred...

...Does liberalism lack a commitment to realizing conditions where citizens would have sufficiently equal resources with which to employ their rights actively...

...For orthodox Marxists, a bright line between liberalism and Marxism can best be drawn if no category of democratic theory (without a class label) is even acknowl348 • DISSENT Political Theory edged...

...More provocatively, does it express a strategy of complicity in class relations, as the individualizing effects of the liberal state disorganize the subordinate classes...

...The ideal speech situation echoes Marxist visions of the future, while providing normative grounds for opposing forces that impede communication now...

...This prospect is vastly more appealing than another round of recrimination between orthodox Marxism and conservative liberalism, in which conventional positions are restated mainly for the purpose of cementing deservedly precarious commitments...

...In a recent book on social democracy in Scandinavia, for example, Gosta Esping-Anderson charged that Adam Przeworski's approach to class formation and to the history of social democracy was Leninist...

...Alec Nove has posed a model of socialist economic relations to integrate market elements and democratic planning mechanisms...

...Finally, a number of works strongly influenced by Marxism have raised anew the question of political strategy...

...When one has to guess at the actual politics of a major work, a new separation of Marxist theory from politics has been reached—and Cohen's claim that history will go in the right direction seems gratuitous...

...If history was a process without subjects, political debate could only articulate the class struggle in the realm of theory...

...To combine the two, he posits an ideal speech situation (an ideal community, without domination) in which participants recognize common interests in reaching agreement on the best argument...

...John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982...

...Most liberal regimes are accompanied by high levels of social inequality, and many by major class-linked differences in the extent and efficacy of political participation, even if the extension of rights continues (and expands in response to new social and political movements...

...In the ensuing discussion, few lasting converts to the notion of a class-based "humane nonmorality" were won...

...John Elster's careful evaluation of Marxist theory (Making Sense of Marx) ends up rejecting most of orthodox Marxism, and heavily qualifies the rest...

...The claim is that this model can link rights and conditions without jeopardizing liberty...

...Claims about what is possible "under socialism" now have to be justified persuasively, not simply stated as the obverse of capitalist problems...

...Despite the new Marxist presence, deep conflicts continue over whether it can produce an adequate contemporary political theory...

...They argue that diverse social relations—class, gender, ethnicity—can be the basis of democratically oriented political identities...

...such identities can be linked in an always unstable but nonetheless effective political bloc...

...Most of these theoretical efforts show the marks of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, whose democratic and egalitarian aims are theoretically pertinent, even if they achieved less than their proponents had hoped...

...And what else but merciless realism could bring socialist decency to a bloody world...

...Cambridge University Press, 1987...

...Instead, as Marxism has become more legitimate, its orthodoxies have decayed...

...Marxist political practice would resolve troubling theoretical tensions...

...Orthodox Marxists (now often Trotskyists of one sort or another) can reassure themselves by denouncing the very idea of post-Marxism...

...In classical Marxism, politics expressed class conflict...

...the focus on communication gives norms a central role...

...As such efforts leave Marxist orthodoxy behind, the way is open for genuinely new encounters with non-Marxist liberal and democratic theories, with the prospect of real advances beyond what has been achieved in either liberal or Marxist theorizing...

...Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985...

...Inequalities of power frame the exercise of political rights and liberties so as to undermine the latter...

...C. Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980...

...Here liberals argue that social and political conditions make these rights purely formal, while a reconstruction of conditions is required for rights really to exist...

...This approach opens little analytical space for considering politics in any form...

...Carmen Sirianni has analyzed how work and time might be organized in an egalitarian and developmental fashion...

...But a moment's thought about "state socialist" regimes in Eastern Europe makes the issue clear...

...The recent work of Jurgen Habermas tries to honor the aims of analytical clarity and generality that motivate contractarian theories— accounts of politics that start with an abstract choice situation in which imagined individuals try to reach agreement on the design of a political order compatible with their essential interests...

...But he makes a strong case for equality of conditions as a basis for equal liberty...

...His main question was moral and strategic: If productive forces do not necessarily generate a progressive development, how should social choices be made...

...Laclau and Mouffe want their critique of classical Marxism to begin a dialogue with "poststructuralist" views that treat political life as fluid, volatile, and permeable—lacking a definite center or predefined stakes of conflict...

...At the same time, Habermas tries to ground political norms in the conventions of actual communities...

...For the former, orthodox Marxism is a useful point of negative reference...

...Rights are determined by powers, and powers derive from production relations, which in turn express forces of production...

...John Rawls's distinction between liberty and worth of liberty and Ronald Dworkin's inquiry into relations between equal rights and equal resources underline this recognition...

...He doubtless has views, but the silences of his book suggest the political defects of contemporary efforts to renew Marxist orthodoxy...

...344 • DISSENT Political Theory leading past capitalism toward the new society...

...One result is reticence and SUMMER • 1989 • 345 Political Theory awkward abstractness about politics so that it can be hard even to guess what a given theorist actually thinks...

...Roberto Unger has amplified the modernist side of the SUMMER • 1989 • 347 Polhhal Theory Marxist tradition in arguing for a fluid, diverse social order...

...Rights are central in liberal discourse about politics, while Marxists stress the role of (crucially socioeconomic) conditions for the prospects of a good political order...

...The second question remains hard for many liberals to take seriously...

...But liberal treatments of rights and conditions remain inadequate...

...Robert Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985...

...Political strategy focused on organizing and mobilizing the working class...

...Both for conservative liberals and orthodox Marxists, there is a great deal at stake in preserving a sharp boundary between liberal and Marxist theory...

...At this junction, contemporary problems about democracy appear theoretically as questions about how to relate rights and conditions...

...The premise is a dualistic reworking of the Marxist tradition in which labor and communication are posited as basic human capacities...

...Orthodox Marxism has long oscillated between a technological and economic emphasis and accounts that give more weight to social relations of production...

...Production relations in turn "need" a superstructure, and secure it, in order to sustain themselves...

...In the 1960s and 1970s he tried to rebuild the classical Marxist theory of society and to restate an SUMMER • 1989 • 343 Political Theory apparently nonnormative account of how political practices would yield a socialist future...

...Richard Miller, Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power, and History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984...

...It is easy enough to agree that Unger's writing is vague and grandiose, or that Laclau and Mouffe risk denying the possibility of a causal account of social processes...

...and arguing about political relations among diverse forces in democratic political blocs, without granting any force a priori primacy...

...Cohen rebuilds Marxism by stressing the primacy of productive forces...

...Habermas and his followers, deeply committed to modernity, need to be arguing with communitarian political theorists and cultural critics such as Michael Sandel and Robert Bellah...

...Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (New York: Verso, 1985...

...This boils/ down to restating the idea of a class morality, grounded in a known logic of historical development...

...What is exciting is the prospect of unexpected turns, new formulations, real theoretical advances...

...To redraw and sometimes blur boundaries will produce no automatic agreements, but better and more productive arguments—for example, between those whose democratic proposals center on change and development and those who favor deepening the egalitarian elements of existing communities...

...What of Neoorthodoxy...

...Sirianni and Unger should be debating liberal theorists such as Robert Dahl about the appropriate institutional mechanisms for sustaining advanced forms of democracy...

...David Held, Models of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987...

...They mediate between an economic base and a mainly noneconomic superstructure...

...Why do productive forces develop at all...

...This article is not a survey of all the new Marxist writing in political theory, much less an account of relations between Marxism and other influential "critical" theories, particularly feminism...

...Drawing such a line secures a political and theoretical identity, though at the cost of enduring marginality...

...Althusser's structuralist arguments provided new grounds for rejecting all moral claims...

...When agency disappears altogether, the resulting debate is likely to be an unproductive rerun of arguments about Althusserian antihumanism...

...And Laclau and Mouffe should be engaged with democratic pluralists and feminists...

...Yet when liberal theorists assume current regimes of rights as their framework, they still tend to focus more on identifying rights than on evaluating their practical meaning...

...This "communitarian" argument seems to be in harmony with a long history of criticism of the abstractly individualistic side of liberalism, and thus it might seem obvious that Marxists and others who have made such criticism would favor communitarian arguments...

...Marxists have obtained prestigious positions at major universities and had their books issued by influential publishers...

...A third stream of Marx-inspired work directly takes up questions of institutional design...

...The latter— means of production plus labor power— shape production relations...

...The ambition of his book and its analytical earnestness were widely praised, but his arguments rarely accepted...

...In rethinking strategic questions, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's recent Hegemony and Socialist Strategy stands out...