https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/06/back-to-class.html
Here’s a smart review by Malcolm Harris of Vivek Chibber’s new book, The Class Matrix: Social Theory After the Cultural Turn (Harvard UP, 2022). It’s remarkable that such a review appears in New York Magazine—I mean, why would a scholarly book on the arcane intricacies of Marxist theory be of interest to this magazine’s editors and readers?
Or is it so remarkable? Marxism entered the mainstream of academic discourse in the 1970s, having lain not exactly dormant since the 1950s in various forms, for example as “modernization theory” in the social sciences, the Cambridge capital controversy in economics led by Joan Robinson and Piero Sraffa, the revolt against the reductionist imperative of socialist realism in literary criticism led by Raymond Williams (and, at a different remove, Lionel Trilling), and the “materialist turn” in psychoanalytical theory led by Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown. By the 1970s, my own pilot discipline of History was dominated by Marxists. [1]
No matter. Since then, the upward redistribution of wealth and income, toward the already rich and famous, has accelerated, to the point where almost everybody, except of course the most ardent capitalists, acknowledges that inequality is bad for capitalism.
As Harris duly notes, and as Chibber acknowledges, the efforts to comprehend and cope with the Great Recession, which included Occupy Wall Street, Thomas Piketty’s breakthrough book, Bernie Sanders’s insurgencies, and, yes, the benighted Tea Party, made household words of the structural inequalities specific to the “financialized capitalism” of post-Reagan America. Meanwhile, an intellectual groundswell called “the ‘new’ history of capitalism” had moved slavery, race, and gender to the top of its list of research priorities. [2]
And still no revolt of the masses, except from the fascist lumpendeploretariat known as the MAGAsphere. How come?
Both author and reviewer complain about the neglect of “material [read: economic] realities” enabled by the “cultural turn” of the very late 20th century, when post-structuralism and its cutting edge in French Theory—you know the usual suspects here, foremost among them Michel Foucault—became the lingua franca of the humanities and social sciences, and when, as a result, cultural studies threatened to supplant or colonize every discipline. Chibber and Harris welcome the return of rigorous class analysis, which must come, they assume, of a Marxism that renews itself by ridding itself of an overweening interest in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Like the comrades over at Jacobin and Dissent, and like their compatriots who have derided the so-called cultural Left in academe—Richard Rorty, Todd Gitlin, and Adolph Reed come to mind—they believe that real politics and real change require workers’ organization, cohesion, and class consciousness, aided and abetted, of course, by left-wing intellectuals who know why capitalism belongs in the dustbin of history. [3]
The principal impediment to the realization of that goal remains the persistent and, it seems, widening gap between class position and class allegiance: workers just don’t recognize that their material [read: economic] interests as workers are served by anti-capitalist programs and policies. In other words—these are not my words, I’m translating from a language I refuse to speak—workers’ subjectivity gets in the way of their obvious, “objective” location within the class structure of capitalism, a location that can be scientifically determined by the collection and study of sociological data.
Why is that? Why doesn’t the working class understand its own best interests?
It could be “false consciousness,” as per Thomas Frank’s laments about the literal and figurative Kansas (this laughable notion assumes that correct ideas correspond to a fixed external reality called “the facts”). It could be the confusion and/or the collaboration of the dreaded PMC, the “professional-managerial class” named by Barbara and John Ehrenreich. It could be the unequal distribution of “cultural capital” according to income and its correlates, educational attainment and “taste,” as per Pierre Bourdieu’s formulations. Or it could be “contradictory class location,” as Chibber’s mentor Erik Olin Wight would have it, which means not that workers have two jobs but that they have different profiles and purposes, depending on the differences in their families, occupations, incomes, and educations.
Complicating matters still further are the prisoner’s dilemma and the free rider problem, two sides of the same coin of rational choice as depicted in game theory. The right choice for an individual—to betray your co-conspirators in exchange for a reduced sentence, or to gain the benefits of union organization without risking your job and paying dues—is quite often the wrong one for the collective. But in a society animated by a devout, almost demented individualism, it’s typically the obvious one.
What could be missing from these exemplary expositions of Marxist class analysis?
Three very simple historical facts:
(1) Individuality and community or collectivity aren't mutually exclusive choices, especially after the advent of corporate capitalism on a global scale, ca. 1890-1930.
To assume that they are is to grant modern liberalism its most fundamental premise, that a rights-bearing individual is always already prior to, exempt from, and unencumbered by any (a) social aggregate, whether large (an estate, a class, a region, a nation) or small (a family, a synagogue, a neighborhood) or (b) received tradition, whether religious or political or merely familial. To assume that individuality and community or collectivity are the terms of an either/or choice is to ignore the innumerable associations and identifications made possible and necessary by the creation of collective corporate bodies and legal “persons,” the emergence of the “social self” at the law and in everyday life, and the consequent eclipse of the individual as the essential atomic particle of political organization and action.
(2) Class position is the product of struggle (or performance), not its predicate or presupposition, that is, something defined or determined, a priori, by sociological data.
This is why Eric Olin Wright's mountain of work is a monumental dead end, and why his admirers and students will never understand the past or the present of capitalism, nor imagine a future wherein the condition of the development of all is the development of each. This is also why the political scientist Adam Pzreworski and the feminist philosopher Judith Butler offer alternatives to the pseudo-scientific trap that lets a sociologist decide what a worker’s “objective” position is within the class structure of late capitalism, or an obstetrician decide what a baby’s “objective” position must be within the sex/gender system specific to late capitalism.[4]
(3) Ideas themselves are material forces of production because they don't just saturate and characterize social aggregates large and small, they constitute social movements as such.
Or, try this, what I said in the concluding chapter of my first book, Origins of the Federal System: Money Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890-1913 (Cornell UP, 1986), in a footnote that predicted my subsequent career as an intellectual and a socialist:
"I assume that a social class may be defined as a collective historical actor whose constituent occupational elements share a common relationship to the means of production (the resources, instruments, and techniques with which labor is undertaken) because their actions or outlook negate or affirm existing relations of production (the social norms and technical/legal rules that govern the appropriation of human labor and its products). This definition is distinguishable from those of Max Weber and C. Wright Mills, since it neither equates class position with market position . . . nor limits the relevant criteria to legal claims on means of production . . . . It is a pragmatic definition in the strictest Peircean terms, because it includes the knower in the known. Hence it makes intelligible the apparent contradiction between 'objective' juridical position in the property system and class allegiance, as, for example, 'managerial' proletarians in the 20 th century. See also Appendix B below [A Note on Class Analysis, pp. 238-46].” (n. 20 and related text at p. 230-31.)
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[1] See James Livingston, “’Marxism’ and the Politics of History: Reflections on the Work of Eugene D. Genovese,” Radical History Review #88 (2004): 30-48; and James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (1994), chap. 1, 3-5 and related footnotes at pp. 295-304, 315-42.
[2] The leading lights here are Walter Johnson, Sven Beckert, Richard John, Jonathan Levy, Jeffrey Sklansky, Amy Dru Stanley, and, at a few disciplinary removes, David Graeber, Mary Poovey, and J.K. Gibson-Graham.
[3[ See James Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (2001), chap. 4; and, on Adolph Reed, James Livingston, “Race, Class, Cops, and Capitalism,” POLITICS/LETTERS Live, June 24, 2020: http://politicsslashletters.org/uncategorized/race-class-cops-and-capitalism/.
[4]. See Pzreworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (1985); Butler, Gender Trouble (1990).