Living Fire
OPEN MARXISM 4: AGAINST A CLOSING WORLD
FORTHCOMING LATE 2019
Foreword Open Marxism vol. 4
Open Marxism. Volume 4, 2019
Werner Bonefeld-York
https://www.academia.edu/38682137/Foreword_Open_Marxism_vol._4?campaign=upload_emailGo
(Draft) Foreword to the forthcoming edition of Open Marxism vol. 4, edited by Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, Alfonso García Vela, Edith González & John Holloway, Pluto Press, late 2019
Publication Date: 2019
Publication Name: Open Marxism. vol.4
FORTHCOMING NOVEMBER 2019
Ana Cecilia DINERSTEIN, Alfonso GARCIA VELA, Edith GONZALEZ and JOHN HOLLOWAY (Eds.)(2019) Open Marxism 4. Against a closing world, Pluto Press, London – NY.
Foreword by Werner Bonefeld
More than twenty years have passed since the publication of the first three volumes of Open Marxism. Since then, the approach has had a transformative impact on how we think about Marxism in the twenty-first century.
‘Open Marxism’ aims to think of Marxism as a theory of struggle, not as an objective analysis of capitalist domination, arguing that money, capital and the state are forms of struggle from above and therefore open to resistance and rebellion. As critical thought is squeezed out of universities and geographical shifts shape the terrain of theoretical discussion, the editors argue now is the time for a new volume.
Emphasising the contemporary relevance of ‘Open Marxism’ in our moment of political uncertainty, the collection shines a light on its significance for activists and academics today.
See in PLUTO PRESS Catalogue pp. 14-15
http://plutopressmarketing.co.uk/public/PLUTO PRESS_LBF19 Rights Catalogue.pdf
Foreword
Werner Bonefeld
The previous three volumes of Open Marxism were published between 1992 and 1995. What a time that was! The Soviet Empire had collapsed, and capitalism was duly celebrated with great fanfare as not only victorious but also as the epitome of civilisation that had now been confirmed as history’s end – as if history maintains in the service of vast wealth a class of dispossessed producers of surplus value. History does not use pursue its own ends and it does not assert itself in the interests of bourgeois civilisation, morality and profitability. History does not make society. Nor does it take sides. It is rather that society makes history. And society is nothing other than the social individuals pursuing their own ends in their class divided social relations. History was truly made in the late 1980s and early 1990s. About this there is no doubt.
Amidst the fanfare, the debtor crisis of the 1980s had started to move from the global South to the global North, from the crash of 1987 via the third global recession in less than 20 years in the early 1990s to the various currency crises, including those of the British Pound and the Mexican Peso in 1992 and 1994 respectively. The Peso crisis coincided with the uprising of the Zapatistas in 1994. Then there was the emergence of China as a world power, founded on a labour economy that combines authoritarian government with the provision of cheap labour and disciplined labour relations. And it was the time also of the first Gulf war, mere posturing of might in search for a global enemy that was needed to secure the domestic containment of the querulous rabble, as Hegel put it when remarking on how a successful war can check the domestic unrest and consolidate the power of the state at home.
Since the early 1990s, with the passing into oblivion of the Soviet Empire, the entire edifice of Marxism-Leninism has tumbled also. It had served as the official doctrine and source for legitimation of state socialism and its various derivative ideologies that found expression in either Gramscian or Althusserian Eurocommunism or in the manifold sectarian organisations that proclaimed their allegiance to Trotsky, Lenin’s military commander and suppressor of the Kronstadt uprising of 1921. Although these traditions continue to force themselves onto the critique of political economy, their history has come to an end. They no longer provide the ideological foundation to what is now yesterday’s idea of the forward march of socialism. To be sure, some still believe in the revolutionary party as an end in itself. Yet, in reality the party is no more – it had in fact been gone a long time before. It died in Spain during the civil war and during the show-trails in Stalinist Russia and its morbid foundation perished finally in either 1953 or 1956, or indeed 1968. Like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France is just a ghost of yesterday. Neither is a Chavez or a Maduro, or indeed an Ortega – and that is a relief. In fact, both, Corbyn and Mélenchon, seek political power for the sake of justice in an unjust world. Instead of the critique of political economy, the endeavour now is to moralise and lament by way of political philosophy conceptions of well-being.
In distinction, the Open Marxism volumes did not argue for justice in an unjust world by means of state socialist planning of labour economy, and progressive schemes of taxation and just ideas for redistribution. Nor did they argue in favour of hegemonic strategies for the achievement of political power on behalf of the many. They did not endorse the state as the institution of institutions. Rather, they understood that profit is the purpose of capital and that the state is the political form of that purpose.They understood also that world market competition compels each nation state to achieve competitive labour markets, which are the condition for achieving a measure of social integration. The politics of competitiveness, sound money, fiscal prudence, enhanced labour productivity, belong to a system of wealth that sustains the welfare of workers on the condition that their labour yields a profit. In this system of wealth, the profitability of labour is a means not only of avoiding bankruptcy; it is also a means of sustaining the employment of labour. Protectionism is a measure of defence within free trade – and in relationship to labour markets, it amounts also to an anti-immigrant policy of exclusion and racialization, of the national us and the ‘othered’ them, citizens from nowhere.
The profitable exploitation of labour is the condition for the sustained employment of workers. It allows workers to maintain access to the means of subsistence through wage income. It is the case also that there is a fate far worth than being an exploited worker and that is, to be an unexploitable worker. If labour power cannot be traded, what else can be sold to make a living and achieve a connection to the means of subsistence? That is, first of all, the producers of surplus value, dispossessed sellers of labour power, are free to struggle to make ends meet. Their struggle belongs to the conceptuality of capitalist wealth – that is, money that yields more money. In this conception of wealth the satisfaction of human needs is a mere sideshow. What counts is the time of money. What counts therefore is the valorisation of value through the extraction of surplus value. There is no time to spare. Time is money. And then suddenly society finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence to the class that works for its supper. And second, the understanding of the mysterious character of an equivalence exchange between unequal values, of money that yields more money, lies in the concept of surplus value. There is trade in labour power, and then there is the consumption of labour that produces a total value that is greater then the value of labour power. The equivalence exchange relations are thus founded on the class relationship between the buyers of labour power and the producers of surplus value. This social relationship, which entails a history of suffering, vanishes in its economic appearance as an exchange between one quantity of money and another.
Contrary to a whole history of Marxist thought, class struggle is not something positive. Rather, it belongs to the capitalist social relations, and drives them forward. Class struggle does not follow some abstract idea. Nor does it express some ontologically privileged position of the working class, according to which it is the driving force of historical progress as the traditions of state socialism saw it. Rather it is struggle for access to the means of subsistence. It is a struggle to make ends meet. The notion that this struggle manifests a socialist commitment because of itself, is really just an abstract idea. There is no doubt also that the demand for a politics of justice recognises the suffering of the dispossessed. Political commitment towards the betterment of the conditions of the working class is absolutely necessary – it civilises society’s treatment of its workers. Nevertheless, the critique of class society does not find its positive resolution in the achievement of fair and just exchange relations between the sellers of labour power and the consumers of labour. What is a fair wage? Is it not the old dodge of the charitable alternative to the employer from hell, who nevertheless also pays his labourers with the monetised surplus value he previously extracted from them? The critique of class society finds its positive resolution only in a society in which the progress of the ‘muck of ages’ has come to an end.
The Open Marxism volumes of the 1990s saw themselves as a contribution to the attempt at freeing the critique of capitalist labour economy from the dogmatic embrace of the bright side view that capitalist economy is an irrationally organised labour economy. In this view socialism is superior to capitalism because it is a rationally organised labour economy through conscious planning by public authority. The anti-capitalism of central economic planning, or, in today’s flat enunciation of Negri’s and Hardt’s term of the multitude, the politics for the many is entirely abstract in its critique of labour economy. In fact, it presents the theology of anti-capitalism – one that looks on the bright side in the belief that progress will be made upon the taking of government by the party of labour. What is capitalist wealth, what belongs to its concept, and what is its dynamic, and what therefore holds sway in its concept? Only a reified consciousness can declare that it is in possession of the requisite knowledge and technical expertise and know-how for regulating capitalism in the interests of the class that works for both, the expansion of social wealth in the form of capital and for its supper. The Open Marxism volumes sought to reassert the critique of the capitalist social relations as a critique of political economy, of both labour economy and the principle of political power, at least that was the critical intension.
The critical purpose of the Open Marxism volumes was to free Marx from the ‘perverters of historical materialism’, as Adorno had characterised the doctrinal Marxists in Negative Dialectics. For this to happen, looking on the bright side is not an option. Rather, it entails an attempt at thinking in and through the logic social wealth, its production and circulation, that holds sway in capitalist political economy. In the absence of such an attempt, the sheer unrest of life that belongs to the concept of capital and sustains its progress will not be understood. Instead, it will either be romanticised as alienated species being or viewed, with moralising righteousness, as an electoral resource.
The said purpose of the attempt at freeing Marx from orthodox ritualization was not in any case novel. In fact, it could look back onto a distinguished history that included the council communism of for example Pannekoek, Gorter and Mattick, the work of Karl Korsch, the critical theory of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, the Yugoslav Praxis Group, Axelos’s open marxism, the Situationist International, the critical Marxist tradition in Latin America associated with Echeverría, Sánchez Vázquez, Schwarz, and Arantes, the state derivation debate of amongst others Gerstenberger, Blanke, Neußüss, and von Braunmühl, the neue Marx Lektüre of amongst others Backhaus, Reichelt and Schmidt, the autonomous Marxism of amongst others Dalla Costa, Federici, Tronti, Negri, Cleaver, and Bologna, and in the context of the British-based Conference of Socialist Economists from which it emerged, the works of especially Simon Clarke and John Holloway about value, class, and state. Simon Clarke’s critique of structuralist Marxism, especially the works of Levi-Strauss, Althusser and Poulantzas, and his contributions to state theory and value form analysis were fundamental in the immediate context of the early 1990s.
The title Open Marxism derived from the work of Johannes Agnoli, a Professor of the Critique of Politics at the Free University of Berlin. His contribution to the heterodox Marxist tradition focused the critique of political economy as a subversive critique of the economic categories, the philosophical concepts, the moral values and the political institutions, including the form of the state, of bourgeois society. The direct link between the title of the Open Marxism volumes and Agnoli is the title of a book that he published with Ernest Mandel in 1980: Offener Marxismus: Ein Gespräch über Dogmen, Orthodoxie & die Häresie der Realität (Open Marxism: A Discussion about Doctrines, Orthodoxy & the Heresy of Reality). The choice of the Open Marxism title was not about paying homage to Johannes Agnoli as the foremost subversive thinker of his time. It was programmatic.
The much too long delayed publication of this forth volume of Open Marxism does not require contextualisation. Nothing is as it was and everything is just the same. We live in a time of terror and we live in a time of war. The so-called elite has become a racket. Antisemitism is back en vogue as both the socialism of fools and as the expression of thoughtless resentment and nationalist paranoia. Racism is as pervasive as it always was – as enemy within and without. The so-called clash of civilisation is unrelenting in its inexorable attack on the promise of freedom. Even the talk about socialism in one country has made a comeback without sense of purpose – first because there can be none, and second because there is none. The political blow back of the crisis of 2008 has been intense and relentless Austerity. Precariat. Profitability. Rate of growth. Price competitiveness. What is so different however from the early 1990s is that capitalism as a term of critical inquiry has vanished; it is has disappeared from contemporary analysis. The Zeitgeist recognises neoliberalism as the object of critique. As a consequence, the past no longer comes alive in the critique of contemporary conditions. Instead, it appears as a counterfoil of imagined civility to today’s much-criticised neoliberal world. The critique of neoliberalism conjures up a time in which money did not yield more money but was rather put to work for growth and jobs. Illusion dominates reality. The spectre of society without memory is truly frightening.
While the first three volumes sought to free Marx from the dogmatic perverters of historical materialism, it seems to me that the purpose of the forth volume is to bring back centre stage the critique of capitalism, in parts to re-establish in a (self-) critical and open manner what the neoliberal Zeitgeist disavows, and in parts also to think afresh of what it means to say no. On the one hand there is the preponderance of the object – society as a real abstraction that manifests itself behind the backs of the acting subjects – and on the other hand there is the spontaneity of the subject. Hope dies last.
York
March 26, 2019
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