The Crisis of Marxism, The Crisis of Politics
Castoriadis, Cornelius
I must first apologize for the title of this essay. I am not interested in the crisis of Marxism but in the crisis of politics—I mean, emancipatory politics. What must be called not the "crisis"...
...But this collapse has opened for us the true political question: that is, once the oxymoronic idea that the object of politics is dictated by some sort of "historical necessity" is abandoned and assuming that we do not identify politics with the management of the existing order of things or the introduction of millimetric "improvements" in this order, how can we elucidate the object of politics and render account and reason for our political choices and actions...
...They had a profound and lasting impact on society—but they waned, and never created a new, global political vision...
...Not "voluntarism," but the capacity of self-reflexive deliberation and decision, without which even thinking itself is impossible...
...Why, then, discuss Marx in relation to the crisis of politics today...
...But even if it were not, to draw from this collapse the conclusion that it nullifies Marx's work would be tantamount to accepting the Hegelian principle of Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht —world history is the Last Judgment— that is, paradoxically, to remain a Marxist...
...If the "immanent critique" is strictly immanent, it is not a critique of reality but just a part of it...
...He believes he has produced a watertight "scientific" theory of society, history, and economy...
...I consider this, as I do third-worldism, a most awkward attempt to preserve the Marxian framework by simply substituting new social categories for the old ones...
...Marcuse thought that youth, students, marginal categories, and so on would take the place of the workers' movement...
...Free thinking, the kernel of the project of autonomy, is a creation of our history...
...And it is clear that the answer could not be found in reality itself...
...In both cases, the future has to be "superior" to the past, and the "best" of the past is conserved in the present...
...This is of course a teleology (and theology) of history, and this teleology is clearly present in Marx (as in bourgeois liberalism...
...He shares in the mythology of "progress...
...But any teleology of history not only makes politics meaningless...
...That humans make their own history ends up meaning—or rather, means from the start, already in The German Ideology—that they make tools and by making tools they inescapably bring about all the rest...
...And for the reasons hinted at above, a total determinism is also untenable, which is but another way of asserting that whatever is real, is rational...
...This is necessary even after the foundering of the so-called "Marxist-Leninist" regimes...
...It is true that, as already said, this work is contaminated to a lethal degree by the social imaginary significations of capitalism...
...We reject the Marxian idea of "grounding" it on the "laws of history" or even on the movement of the workers if only, simply, because this movement no longer exists except as one of the many interest groups fighting within rich capitalist societies...
...For a time, one could think—as I thought myself—that the workers' movement was this factor...
...Therefore, any idea of accumulation or progress on a total and universal level is strictly meaningless...
...To be sure, nobody can pass a final judgment on the current social-historical period...
...Still, before dealing with this question, I will try to summarize very briefly some of the numerous points that have made, to my eyes and long ago, Marx's conception untenable...
...For forty years now, with the exception of the minority or sectional struggles just mentioned, there is an unmistakable decline of the social and political conflict...
...It is equally easy to show that this autonomy is not an "individual" affair, that it is decisively conditioned by the institution of society—not in the sense of the absence of "external" repression but in the sense of the internalization of institutions by the social individual making possible free and unfettered thinking...
...The answer is easy on the theoretical level because the very fact of posing such a question forces, so to speak, its own answer...
...What must be called not the "crisis" but the wholesale collapse of Marxism has been obvious to me for more than thirty years now...
...Marx can escape these questions because it just so happens (or happened) that the workers' movement aspires (or aspired) toward freedom, equality, justice...
...Logically and philosophically, the idea that "an actual movement which suppresses the existing social reality" is good in and of itself or that we have to support it presupposes a (properly speaking silly) postulate, at the center of a progressivist metaphysics of history...
...The idea of one true theory begets the politically monstrous idea of orthodoxy...
...De jure, the project of autonomy concerns the whole of society...
...Their invocation of Marx was of course a hoax...
...All this has had deep and catastrophic effects on the workers' movement...
...But here arises the second, much more difficult, question...
...Even an ecological catastrophe, in the present atmosphere of apathy and privatization, would be as likely to bring about a new kind of fascism as to wake up people...
...Objective conditions by themselves mean little...
...To say that a political project of transformation of reality is worthless unless it can find in social-historical reality itself the factors making its realization possible is obvious and even trivial...
...I will rather concentrate on the political "realistic" aspect of the idea...
...Now, if one takes away Marx's economics, his "materialist" conception of history and his belief in "historical laws," his messianistic fantasy of a future society fully transparent to itself and spontaneously self-regulated, what remains...
...As 224 • DISSENT for the people in the poor countries, who form 85 percent of the planet's population, they have proved up to now incapable of breaking with their traditional theocratic religious creeds, or else easy prey for military or "socialist" tyrannies The project of autonomy, or emancipatory politics, is not a political endeavor like any other...
...Almost all of these points are related to the fact that Marx is deeply immersed in the capitalist imaginary, the nuclear significance of which he never questions...
...that is, a church or a party machine...
...And autonomous thinking is both a precondition and a concomitant of the effective autonomy of the individual as well as of the collectivity...
...First of all, of course, because this very conception of Marx's, and its subsequent degeneracy and final collapse, is one of the factors that have precipitated the crisis of politics...
...He is fully taken by the fantasy of rational mastery of man over nature and over himself...
...It is not the only one: the Inquisition, Stalinism, Nazism are also creations of our history...
...He believes in the centrality of production and economy...
...We create history—forms of society, oeuvres, and so on—and we have to choose among our creations...
...The socialpsychical structure of the present individuals is more and more exclusively shaped by the nuclear imaginary signification of capitalism: unlimited expansion of (pseudo-)rational (pseudo-)mastery...
...At the same time, however, it allows itself to pass an unrestricted positive judgment on the totality of the process, which is, and can only be, good...
...True also, it played a catastrophic role through its influence both on workers and intellectuals...
...If somebody asks for reasons, for reasonable reasons, he has already entered the field of the logon didonai, of rendering account and reason, which in itself entails the recognition of the value of autonomy in the sphere of thinking...
...On the one hand, there is the apparent triumph of the capitalist imaginary...
...De facto, 90 percent of the population could be expected to support it...
...This mars even his best achievements: thus his economics, of lasting value as a sociological inquiry into the mechanisms of capitalism, are untenable as economics proper, and the main reason for this is that Marx transforms into a theoretical axiom what is the (unattainable and self-contradictory) practical objective of capitalism—that labor power is (has to become) just a commodity like any other...
...And, finally, for many countries and many decades, it has been inextricably mixed with the workers' movement, which, even if it failed in its central aims, brought about transformations of the capitalist society without which this society would probably not have survived and, at any rate, would not be what it is today...
...To insist: the hidden assumptions in Marx's position are equivalent to a sancta realitas principle, or the thesis of the rationality of the real...
...A short reflection can only lead us to reject Marx's stand on this point, which is, after all, the primary point in any political position...
...But this stand raises very important questions, sidestepped or laughed out of court by Marx himself and by the best of Marxist writers...
...it pertains to the structure of power...
...This one cannot hold anymore...
...It does not exist for the true faithful, indeed for any individual in a "traditional" society...
...that is, not only necessary but sufficient, which is clearly the idea of Marx and which, if true, would make of the idea that humans make their history sheer nonsense, of history itself an immense deterministic concatenation, and of the ideas of truth, of value, of choice, of responsibility pure illusions functioning in view of ends unknown and unknowable to their bearers...
...Leaving aside some acute and profound social-historical descriptions—the Eighteenth Brumaire, the chapter on primitive accumulation in Capital—what remains is what I have called "the other element" in Marx: the element that stresses human activity, affirms that humans make their own history under determinate conditions generally without knowing it, and asserts that we have to find in actual historical reality the factors tending to transform this same reality...
...And this is a political will and project, whereby we link ourselves with one of the essential strands of Greek-Western history...
...This choice is made possible by our history, but, as experience amply shows, is not dictated by it...
...But Marx means much more than that...
...That we cannot, ought not, and have not to support a movement just because it is "real" or the dominant social-historical trend hardly needs discussion...
...On the one hand, it forbids judgment on any and all particular events or instances of reality, since they all form necessary elements of the Grand Design...
...We still adhere—and I would add, for my part: more than ever—to the project of social and individual autonomy—of human SPRING • 1992 • 223 emancipation, if you prefer...
...The choice, when brought to bear on the form of institutions, is politics properly understood...
...But this only means that the real movement of negation is more real than the reality it negates...
...History—as well as Being—is creation as well as destruction: creation of forms and destruction of forms...
...and who would dare to raise even the question of the value or the legitimacy of those aims (though of course Marx scorns the ideas of value or legitimation...
...The first question is: why—in the sense of for what reason?—do you support the project of autonomy...
...On the other hand, we certainly do not yet live in fourth-century Rome or Constantinople...
...or we would have to support today the frantic course of technoscience and the "development of productive forces" destroying this planet...
...And if someone were to say that there are conflicting trends in reality, so we must choose among them, the question 222 • DISSENT would still arise, choose on what grounds...
...But the present social-historical reality is different...
...It is immaterial if this accumulation is taken to be "linear" or "dialectical...
...It is a choice, and as such it entails a category easily forgotten in philosophical and political discussions today: It entails will...
...But we cannot escape in the same way, both on empirical and theoretical grounds...
...True, many new and important movements emerged during the 1960s: Ethnic minorities, youth and students, women, ecological groups...
...To be sure, the real here is construed to be that which in the real itself negates the real...
...But we choose against heteronomy...
...And creation, in and of itself, is not equivalent to value...
...Empirically, if this were the case, we would have to support Stalinism, or Nazism, or the one after the other according to place and period...
...And it would, of course, be silly to try to find in the "objective contradictions" of the established system a guarantee or even an assurance that the situation will change in this respect...
...Equally, the idea that history is always made under determinate conditions may mean two things: that any historical activity always takes place in a given world, in given circumstances, under necessary conditions that at the same time limit it or that these determinate conditions are also determinant...
...And it is precisely this activity that, in the present period, is dramatically absent...
...whatever comes after is better than what was there before...
...He never dissociates himself from the rationalistic scientism of his (and our) epoch...
...It can only be realized through the autonomous activity of the people...
...A church committed to orthodoxy needs an Inquisition, and heretics must be burned—or sent to the Gulag...
...Why should we value positively something on the grounds that this is the dominant social-historical trend...
...And for the reasons mentioned above, it is this possibility of choice—thus, of politics—that Marx's conception makes impossible...
...To mention but two points: if there is one true theory, all dissenters are wrong or wicked or both...
...But of course a true believer should never argue: he should only show his Book...
...And now we find ourselves in the following position...
...Behind this—if we abstract from the idea of a Divine Plan—lies the assumption that history—and Being in general—is a cumulative process...
...He is blind to the phenomenon of bureaucracy, and this is no accident: bureaucracy is not an "economic" structure...
...At any rate, one has to go beyond these categories—beyond "class thinking...
...But also for another reason...
...He thinks that he has found in reality all he needs, and that there is no problem either of project or of choice...
...And we are left with two questions, the first of which is, to my eyes, easy to answer on the theoretical level, while the second acquires today an agonizing acuity...
...So we can do nothing but maintain our project of a transformation leading to a free society made up of free individuals, on the possibility that our critical activity and the exemplification in our acts of the values we stand for will contribute to bringing about a revival of an emancipatory movement, much more lucid and self-reflexive than the previous ones...
...But, equally true, it embodies one of the most radical, even if failed, attempts toward a critique of the existing social order...
...Whatever one may say of its other aspects, the work of Marx is a part and a moment of the social-historical project of autonomy as it reemerged in Western Europe since the twelfth century...
...it contains an internal contradiction...
...And in both cases, the ultimate platonic fallacy that Being (or, here, Becoming) is in and of itself Good, is entailed...
...Without dwelling on the onesided specification it received in the hands of Marx (for whom this human activity is essentially productive activity), I will only note that this element in itself is again ambiguous...
...To be sure, this is not an argument against a true believer of any religion or dogma...
...Communism, says he, is not a political program but the actual movement transforming social reality...
...We have in front of us, in the rich countries, a population dominated by privatization, apathy, cynicism, and the naked pursuit of consumption for consumption's sake...
...Islands of resistance of the prevailing order of things can be found almost everywhere...
...Marx wants to break with "utopian" thinking and believes that he finds in the actual historical reality the factor that will transform this reality...
...Orthodoxy requires guardians of orthodoxy...
...The events of the last five, or two, years, immensely important and significant as they are in other respects, teach us next to nothing as far as the theoretical body of Marx's work is concerned...
...Supposing this to be true, we are left with the question: Why should we value positively, in advance, whatever transforms reality...
...As I said before, it is obvious that no political project can ignore the question of the factors that may bring about its realization...
...And this very possibility of choice, of nontrivial choice, is itself a historical creation...
...The progressivist metaphysics of history is untenable for the very same reasons that make a global teleology of history untenable...
...So, we will autonomy—for ourselves and for all...
...And if the "development of productive forces" is the supreme criterion, Russia's "industrialization" redeems Stalin's crimes, and the victims SPRING • 1992 • 221 belong to the overhead costs of historical development...
...That humans make themselves first and foremost by creating significations and institutions, that tools themselves are institutions as well as embodiments of meaning—of significationsthat Marx cannot see...
...This, of course, can only be a religious, not a self-reflexive, stand...
...As known, this factor is the proletariat, and of course there can be no doubt about either the historical importance of the workers' movement or the grosso modo legitimacy of its initial aims (I am leaving aside here the discussion with the diehard "liberals...
...We choose to think, therefore also to argue...
...Beyond that, an old line will always retain its validity: Here we stand, we cannot do otherwise...
...Deterministic scientism is only the absolute idealism of the philosophically illiterate...
...And it is easy to show—in fact, it is a tautology—that autonomy in the sphere of thinking is synonymous with reason itself...
...SPRING • 1992 • 225...
...He criticizes neither capitalist technology nor capitalist organization of work, production, and factory—only their use for capitalist ends...
Vol. 39 • April 1992 • No. 2
