Marxism Beyond Marxism [1 ed.] 0415914426, 9780415914420

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Marxism Beyond

Marxism

Marxism Beyond

Marxism

Edited by Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl for the Polygraph collective

i~ ~~o~;~;n~~~up NEW YORK AND LONDON

Published in 1996 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Transferred to Digital Printing 2009 Copyright © 1996 by Routledge Book design: Annette Sroka Devlin All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical of 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 publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication-Data Marxism beyond Marxism I edited by Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl for the Polygraph collective. p. cm. Revised essays from the journal Polygraph. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-91442-6 (cloth). - ISBN 0-415-91443-4 (pbk.) 1. Communism and culture. 2. Communism and society. I. Makdisi, Saree. II. Casarino, Cesare. III. Karl, Rebecca E. HX523.M3767 1996 95-42258 335.4-dc20 CIP Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.

In Memoriam

Bob Sheldon and Guy Debord

Contents Preface and Acknowledgments

IX

Introduction: Marxism, Communism, and History: A Reintroduction

1. Fredric Jameson, Actually Existing Marxism

1 14

2. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Marx After Marxism: History, Subalternity, and Difference

55

3. Peter Hitchcock, Workers of the World

71

4. Kathi Weeks, Subject for a Feminist Standpoint

89

5. Arif Dirlik, Mao Zedong and "Chinese Marxism"

119

6. Antonio Negri, Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation of the Class Situation Today

149

7. Kenneth Surin, "The Continued Relevance of Marxism" as a Question: Some Propositions

8. Rosemary Hennessy, Queer Theory, Left Politics

181 214

9. Maurizio Viano and Vincenzo Binetti, What Is to Be Done?: 243

Marxism and Academia

10. Maivan Clech Lam, A Resistance Role for Marxism 255

in the Belly of the Beast

11. Paolo Virno, Notes on the "General Intellect"

265

Contributors

273

Index

275

Vll

Preface and Acknowledgments on the contemporary relevance of Marxism represents work largely drawn from issue 6/7 of Polygraph, an international journal of politics and culture. Although they have been substantially revised since then, most of these essays were written in late 1992 and early 1993, following the series of events identified as the "end of communism" in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This was, on the one hand, a moment at which Marxism seemed to some observers to have lost all credibility and even to have come to an "end" itself. On the other hand, this was also a moment at which the structure of global capitalism seemed to be undergoing a series of fundamental transformations, which in turn-to many intellectuals and political activists-necessitated a revitalization of Marxism as well as a rethinking of certain of its basic categories and concepts. We have edited this collection on behalf of the editorial collective of Polygraph; our co-editors there are Jonathan Beller, Eleanor Kaufman, Henry Schwarz, Neferti Tadiar and Xudong Zhang. We would especially like to acknowledge Eleanor Kaufman and Xudong Zhang, who worked very closely on the production of Polygraph 6/7 (1993), in which most of the essays here were originally published. Special thanks are also due to Richard Dienst, Henry Schwarz, Michael Speaks and Jeff Twitchell, who founded the journal and worked on most of its issues, and whose ongoing support and advice have been invaluable. Henry Schwarz and Richard Dienst, in particular, worked very closely on Polygraph 5 (1991), in which the essay in this volume by Antonio Negri was first published. Thanks are also due to Michael Hardt for generously making available to the journal his translation of that essay. For their generous support of Polygraph, which not only made the journal possible to begin with but kept it functioning all along, we would like to thank Fredric Jameson, Leigh DeNeef, Lewis Siegel, Katharine Pfeiffer, and Stanley Fish, all of Duke University. We would also like to acknowledge the following departments at Duke for their support: the Department of English, the Department of History, the Department of German, the Department of Religion, THIS VOLUME OF COLLECTED ESSAYS

lX

x •

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

the Department of Romance Languages, and the Department of Slavic Studies. The College of Arts and Sciences and the English Department at Georgetown University helped with the publication of Polygraph 5 (1991). Special thanks are due to the Literature Program and the Graduate School at Duke and the Duke Center for Critical Theory. We acknowledge with gratitude Sandy Swanson, Priscilla Lane, Rodrigo Herrera and especially Sandy Mills, without whose support the journal would never have been possible. Finally, we would like to thank the faithful subscribers to Polygraph. The editors would also like to acknowledge the Humanities Division and the staff of the English Department at the University of Chicago for infra structural support as this book was being revised and prepared for publication. We dedicate this book to the memory of Guy Debord, author of Society of the Spectacle and one of the founders of the Situationist International, who killed himself in Paris in 1994; and to the memory of Bob Sheldon, a friend and supporter of Polygraph, who operated the Internationalist Bookstore in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Bob was an energetic organizer for a number of causes, including the antiwar movement; he was mysteriously shot and killed in his store during one of those tense days of January 1991.

Introduction Marxism, Communism, and History: A Reintroduction And all the Arts of Life they changd into the Arts of Death in Albion. The hour-glass contemnd because its simple workmanship Was like the workmanship of the plowman, & the water-wheel, That raises water into cisterns: broken & burnd with fire: Because its workmanship was like the workmanship of the shepherd. And in their stead, intricate wheels invented, wheel without wheel: To perplex youth in their outgoings, & to bind to labours in Albion Of day & night the myriads of eternity that they may grind And polish brass & iron hour after hour laborious task! Kept ignorant of its use, that they might spend the days of wisdom In sorrowful drudgery, to obtain a scanty pittance of bread: In ignorance to view a small portion & think that All. -William Blake, Jerusalem to this late-twentieth-century collection of essays on Marxism with an epigraph taken from a visionary poem written at the height of the first industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century. And we do so in keeping with the spirit of Blake's visionary project-which was not to return to some idealized pre-capitalist society, but rather to insist on the possibility and indeed the urgent necessity of imagining alternatives to what announced itself from its very beginnings as a tendentially global world-system: the All, the total, the only, the universal-in short, that historical project whose completion would seemingly involve nothing less than the so-called "end of history" of which we have heard so much in recent years. For the "intricate wheels" of the dark Satanic mills of early industrial capitalism, binding their victims to labors in ever-repeated cycles of uniform time measured by WE OPEN THE INTRODUCTION

1

2 •

INTRODUCTION

the hours of the working-day, represented for Blake not only a system of material and economic debasement and exploitation, but above all a seemingly irresistible totality that sought to deny any alternatives to itself. And yet to conform to the "necessities" and "realities" imposed by this system could amount to nothing less than madness and folly for Blake (who, strangely enough, was in his own time thought of as a crank and an oddity, if not a potentially dangerous lunatic). It was as against this machinic system that he struggled-" Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems"l-to imagine not a counter-system but rather an end to all systems; that is, nothing less than the potential unchaining from the realm of necessity of all human creative energies and desires. Such an unchaining would allow us "once again," but in fact for the first time, to see the myriads of an eternity and an infinity whose possibilities are closed off to us by a system that seeks to reduce everything to finite and uniform and above all measurable quantities (as in the hours of the working-day), rather than to allow us to imagine the presently unimaginable. "The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock: but of wisdom, no clock can measure," Blake writes in his manifesto of liberation (the Proverbs of Hell in The Marriage of Heaven & Hell).2 Indeed, the imperative embodied in Blake's visionary prophecies is to resist the narrow confinements of a reality that does not admit of alternatives to itself; and his call to arms, for the unleashing of an uncontained and uncontainable devilish energy against the structures and rules of the actually existing reality of his own day, was at once a call to arms against the guardian Angels of this rationalizing system (including, above all, the ideologues of the established order) and also against the very rules and regulations, principles and laws, demands and requirements, necessities and limits, to which these Angels would otherwise force us to conform. It was of course Oscar Wilde who, a century after Blake, argued for communism precisely because it could only be in a communist society, in which we would all be relieved "from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody," that we could "have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism."3 Indeed, we want to insist that it is now time once again, and as never before, to speak of communism. What we here choose to call communism, however, should not be thought of simply as an always-already deferred utopia-let alone as something akin to the stifling attempt at thoughtless homogeneity that the Soviet Union or other state socialisms finally represented. It should be thought of, rather, as a heuristic device for thinking the heterogeneous forms of an always actually existing radical praxis that seeks to imagine the unimaginable within various actually existing social and political orders; that is, the possibilities implicitly or explicitly circumscribed and forbidden or unimagined by those orders and the systems to which they correspond. For we find ourselves, here and now, nowhere near the sunset of history,

Marxism Beyond Marxism?

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that alleged sunset which has been repeatedly announced by the apologists of the "new world order" as the end of socialism, of communism, of ideology, and of history itself, as various contributors to this volume make clear. The euphoric and self-congratulatory paroxysm with which the delusion of such a series of historic denouements has been so readily welcomed by the ideologues of the world system betrays what some of us had suspected all along, namely, that this purported happy ending of history merely constitutes the unfulfillable yet necessary wish of an undying political bad faith. But if the truly unhappy ending of the Soviet experiment, in fact, marked a long sought-after victory for what now constitutes a whole brave new world of unbridled capitalism, it has also the potential to free communist projects once and for all from statist connotations, imperatives, and temptations. It also lends new vitality and urgency to that desire, expressed by Blake in terms of the infinite, which might be called communism-a desire and indeed a necessity that has been with us all along (though as Maurizio Viano and Vincenzo Binetti point out in their contribution to this volume, even the use of the word "communism" still conjures up a "heavy identity" that threatens to position one somewhere on the "chessboard of the identity game" that is academic politics). For the history of communism-and of the desire for communism-is an ancient one. It has been a radically discontinuous and intermittent history of community, antagonism, and liberation: a sudden, turbulent, unpredictable history of being-in-common among whose epiphanic and yet never entirely realized moments we would want to remember events, texts, and bodies as heterogeneous as Blake's visionary prophecies, to be sure; but also Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo revolution, the Palestinian intifada, the Italian Autonomia movement, Jean Genet's poetics of betrayal, Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, Walt Whitman's Calamus poems, the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, the maroon communities of Jamaica, the Paris Commune, Nat Turner's slave revolution, China's Long March, the African-American civil rights movement, the past and present Zapatista peasant uprisings in Mexico, the poetry of Mahmud Darwish, Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers, Oscar Wilde's Soul of Man Under Socialism, Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacists, Guy Debord and the Situationists, the queer politics of Act Up, Sergei Eisenstein's cinema, the music of The Clash, and that twentieth-century Catholic heresy known as "liberation theology," as well as those numerous tragic icons of an urban community of endurance, resistance and solidarity: Sarajevo, Soweto, Grozny, Beirut.... Such a history cannot be thought in terms of genealogical affinities or simple diachronic sequences, since all that its moments have in common is an antagonistic relation to various realities and various official modes of community and, more often than not, to the multifarious coercions of state power. This is in other words a fundamentally transhistorical history of struggle and desire. If the moments we have chosen to remember here belong roughly to the last two cen-

4 •

INTRODUCTION

turies, that is so because the eruptive instantiations of this radical praxis have increased and intensified exponentially since the advent of modern (industrial) capital in Blake's time, and also since the crystallization of what might be thought of as a world history (the relationship between that world history and various subaltern histories is, as Maivan Clech Lam and Dipesh Chakrabarty remind us in their essays here, complex and difficult to theorize, though it remains an urgent political requirement that we do so). It is also crucial to remember, on the other hand, that what we are calling here the transhistorical history of communism should by no means be confined to industrial modernity (think, for example, of the communitarian impetus of early Christianity, of certain strands of Islamic mysticism and indeed of early Islam itself, of Spinoza's political theology, of the ideals and practices of medieval monasticism). The point here, of course, is to try to understand what it is about our present historical moment that allows-indeed compels-us to produce such seemingly arbitrary groupings and reconstructions out of the past and present ruins of oppositional praxis (and we say seemingly because of the complex network of cross-references that in fact tie together some or all of these events: consider, for example, the ways in which the Situationists in 1968 used to refer to the Paris Communards, or the rhetorical and material ways in which numerous twentieth-century national liberation struggles used to refer to the Haitian revolution of the eighteenth century, or for that matter to each other, across the breadth of Africa, Asia, and Latin America). Here we need to emphasize what is for us a crucial point, and it is one that has gone for the most part unnoticed, which is that our generational position thankfully never allowed us to equate the communist project with that staggering betrayal of it which bore the name of the Soviet state. Indeed, for those of us who came to political consciousness in the 1970s, the Soviet experiment never constituted a hope. Its recent demise, in fact, opens up the possibility and indeed the necessity of extricating an actually existing Marxism from state projects that seemed at times to have little to do with it. Moreover, it is precisely this demise that allows us to uncover, and indeed to constitute as though for the first time (as we have attempted to suggest in the past few pages), a whole range of alternative communist trajectories, projects and histories, and thus to generate from our contemporary standpoint alternative histories of communism that do not teleologically culminate in any of the "actually existing" socialisms, that are indeed free from claims of teleology. Viewed now in this context, the various twentieth-century communist revolutions and the Soviet, Chinese and other experiments in state socialism are stripped of their claims to centrality (such revolutions were, of course, central to their historical moments-but their centrality was retrospectively "projected" ahistorically and teleologically). Meanwhile, other revolutions and experiments, elsewhere in space and time, may be linked together in such a way that this range of alternative histories is not only highlighted by contrast but is in fact allowed to take shape, even if not really for the first time.

Marxism Beyond Marxism?

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But what exactly does all this have to do with Marxism? We believe the history of communism to have increasingly intersected and overlapped with Marxism at crucial points within industrial modernity. We believe the intertwined histories of communism and Marxism to have irreparably transformed each other, to have repeatedly brought each other to crisis. We are not, however, interested in drawing easy historical conclusions or in making hopeful and inescapable forecasts: if Marxism and communism have often formed symbiotic and powerful assemblages, it does not follow that they may not part ways in as yet unforeseeable futures. Indeed, the urgent question for us is whether and how Marxism is to intensify and realize the history of communism while at the same time pointing the way out of-that is, transcending its origins in-capitalism itself. This is in fact one of the central issues raised in different but overlapping ways by Arif Dirlik in his essay on Mao Zedong and by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his essay on Marxism and the question of difference. Investigating Marxism as a western tradition of thought, Chakrabarty addresses some of the thorny questions involved not so much in "improving" Marxism and its ability to deal with various philosophies of difference, but rather in exploring the ways in which various Marxian categories can be made to speak to such differences once they are removed from a western context. (This is also, to be sure, one of the key questions for Maivan Clech Lam in her analysis of the resistance movements of indigenous peoples). As Dirlik argues in his essay, Mao's Marxism points to some fundamental problems inherent in Marxism itself inasmuch as it (Marxism) has been from its origins inextricably embedded in the spatial, temporal and economic logic of capitalism itself. This is why, according to Dirlik, Marxism continues to be indispensable today, even as it also raises the question of how useful it may be as we look for strategies to transcend capitalism. For Mao in his day, and for us today, the problem of political strategy remains a crucial one as we explore what a Marxism beyond Marxism might be, and, more importantly, as we ask what a world "beyond" the world we have now might look like, and how we might get there-for, as Rosemary Hennessy puts it in her essay, the key question for radical philosophy concerns not so much the truth-claims of its theories, but rather their political effectivity. The fact that the question of communism resonates throughout the pages of this volume much according to a theme-and-variations formula is precisely an index of how this continues to return, more and more furiously, as one of the fundamental questions of and for Marxism. This fury is one and the same with the fury with which the present restructurations in the mode of production increasingly sweep our planet. For, as Negri argues, the new stage of capitalist development and expansion seems to have ushered in-alongside and in combination with unprecedented violence and brutality-the material and political conditions of possibility for the realization of precisely the desires and aspirations expressed in communism (one thinks, for example, of that revolution-in-progress

6 •

INTRODUCTION

which is telecommunications, whose potentials for communism are virtually untapped and unexplored). But lest we slip too comfortably into easy diagnoses of the issues at hand, or into too easy a postulation of some uninterrupted continuity lasting from the time of the first industrial revolution to our own, let us remind ourselves of Negri's point in Marx Beyond Marx (which we have adapted for the title of the present collection) that the system of capitalism is "the source of ever more powerful and plural expansions" of antagonisms" Such a centrifugal expansion of antagonisms has today reached a critical point with what Negri, in his contribution to this volume, calls "the total subsumption of society" into capital. This involves nothing less than the colonization of all spheres of social activity by the productive process, that is, by capital understood as value-inprocess. Here we can turn to Richard Dienst's book on the philosophy of television for a compelling account of how such colonization becomes the central node of the global "geotelevisual" system. Dienst argues that we need to regard television not merely as a mode for the distribution of images, but rather as an essential part of the machinery of global capital-machinery which must be seen to include any transfer-point where value can be reconfigured. "Television images," he writes, "are themselves always value-in-process, rather than extraneous pretty pictures at second hand." The point here is not merely that leisure time has been colonized by capital (something that had already been emphasized by the Frankfurt School), but also that, to the extent that some share of our leisure time is put at the disposal of television, "nonwork time becomes subject to the same kinds of antagonisms that cut across labor time.,,5 Given these redistributions of human time and reorganizations of human attention as well as redefinitions of antagonism under capital, to ask what a Marxism beyond Marxism might look like is not at all to assume that we have indeed entered a world of capitalism beyond itself, but rather-following one of the many lines of inquiry that Fredric Jameson puts forth in his essay here-to explore the possibility that "a postmodern capitalism will always call a postmodern Marxism into existence over against itself." For capitalism, all its recent intensifications and metamorphoses notwithstanding, is still with us. As both Jameson and Hennessy point out, one of the most telling shortcomings of that constellation of recent theoretical discourses referred to as "postmarxism" is precisely the absence on their part of an engagement with capitalism itself-a shortcoming that ultimately leaves these discourses not only theoretically incomplete but, more significantly, prevents and precludes any political efficacy on their part (for both, a total system requires a total critique). Indeed, capitalism is not only still with us; it is now global as it never was before. Its circuits of production and exploitation today span the globe at speeds approaching simultaneity. In fact the global informational circuits that Manuel Castells, among others/ has emphasized as the core of the new global economy already operate at a virtual simultaneity, and other

Marxism Beyond Marxism?

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communication technologies regard simultaneity as their ultimate objective: one can only wonder at the profound theoretical implications of British Airways' slogan for Concorde, "speed: the conquest of time," in their ad for a flight that leaves London at 10:30 a.m. and arrives in New York an hour earlier. It may be-to rehearse an old problematic-that at a certain point vast quantitative shifts get translated into, or reappear as, qualitative transformations: as happens, for example, when whole areas of the globe (such as Eastern Europe), having previously been accessible only through what resembled to some an intricate network of "hatches" and "airlocks," are suddenly thrown open to what Jameson figuratively describes in his essay as the staggering and crushing overpressures of the world outside. It remains more important than ever before, however, not to take the triumphalist ideologues of the "new world order" at their word when they themselves speak of the globalization of capitalism, by which they mean the economic homogenization of the entire planet (i.e., its subsumption into one mode of production for one world market). In a recent survey of the global economy in The Economist, for example, we are told in an article addressing First World fears about the "threat from the third world" (i.e., the fears somewhat indelicately expressed in Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound .... ") that the planetary proliferation of manufacturing circuits does not mean the loss of jobs in the most advanced economies, which is also one of the main points of Robert Reich's version of Clintonomics (if we can speak of such a thing). "Trade is never a zero-sum game," we are assured by the author of this unabashed late-twentieth-century restatement of Ricardo's classical-economic principle of comparative advantage; "fears that the third world will steal output and jobs are based on the mistaken belief that any increase in one country's output must be at the expense of another's. A second's thought shows that this is a fallacy." For, the author goes on to argue, "faster growth in the third world ought to be welcomed by everyone. Not only will it relieve poverty in developing countries; it will also provide outside traders with marvellous new business opportunities. ,,7 But as Samir Amin and others have tirelessly reminded us, talk of a potentially uniform spread of the benefits of the free market has been with capitalism since its earliest days. However, all such talk-for which The Economist is today one of the leading venues-has never actually led to homogenization in a system that is now and has always been characterized and structured by inequality at the most profound levels. As Amin argues in his recent book Delinking, the theory of unequal development (most readily identified with Amin himself, though in this context one also thinks of Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, and Arghiri Emmanuel) urges us to recognize the "polarity of the system, that is to say a simultaneous coalescing around one or more central kernels on the one hand, and on the other hand the constitution around this or these kernels of a nebula of satellites that are not 'coalescing.'" In other

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INTRODUCTION

words, Amin insists, '''development' and 'underdevelopment,' in the descriptive sense of these vulgarized expressions, are organically linked and constitute the locus and direction of the same worldwide global development."g Kenneth Surin's suggestion, in his essay in this volume, that the restructuring of capital in its current phase of development necessitates a recasting of certain Marxist paradigms stems not only from his analysis of the current configuration of capital but also precisely from his reading of Amin's analyses of uneven development and of the urgent Third World need to "delink" (which is not to be mistaken for some kind of strange and impossible Albanian or North Korean experiment in autarchy). Surin, however, questions the wisdom of the separation of power and production in a great deal of Marxist analysis, including Amin's. Arguing that it is precisely the consumption of society by capital that creates new spaces for resistance, he insists that a "reconstructed Marxism" must have at its core the axiom that capitalism "will be decisively overcome only when control over the system of productive social cooperation is finally wrested from it." Many of the possibilities that Surin explores in his article, including the need to reconstitute certain categories and assumptions of Marxist discourse with a view towards the gender dynamics linking social production to capital itself, also inhabit the essays by Hennessy, Negri, and Kathi Weeks. Hennessy's intervention in gay and lesbian studies, for example, engages in a materialist-feminist critique of heterosexuality, in which the latter is understood as that crucial nexus between capital and patriarchy which binds them together in a common assemblage. She contends that left political theory and praxis have so far insufficiently critiqued such a nexus, thus reiterating the normative belief that heterosexuality is just the way things are or ought to be. Such an oversight in radical thought, Hennessy maintains, is due to the left's increasing reliance on identity and cultural politics. In an essay that mediates productively between Surin's and Hennessy's, Kathi Weeks addresses the same shortcomings in Judith Butler's critique of gender constructions which Hennessy identifies in her essay. Weeks argues that in discourses of performativity, including Butler'S, "the relations between socioeconomic and political institutions on the one hand and everyday signifying practices on the other are invisible," and proposes that feminist standpoint theory, if properly integrated with a materialist conception of social labor, "can provide the means to address these weaknesses, and, thus, can present an improved account of both the regime of power and its effects." If Negri is correct in suggesting that we are now witnessing yet another transformation in the modalities of capital, such a transformation must be understood as the product of the antagonism between capital and labor, or, rather, the resistance of labor against capital. It is precisely in the socioeconomic structures identified by Surin, Weeks and Hennessy that this resistance takes place. For Negri, this does not at all foreclose possibilities for a systemic transformation. On the contrary, it enables such possibilities, since today the

Marxism Beyond Marxism?

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workers' struggle takes place "within" capital and not merely "against" it (for, as Maivan Clech Lam argues, we are all today "inside the belly of the beast"). It is in this context that the peculiar status of the state in today's global economy is addressed by most of the contributors in this volume; for it must be understood that no matter how undermined and irrelevant or redundant the state may be in a global system, it nevertheless retains a major role in the world today, whether for the consumption of production (as in reckless military spending, which played such a major role in the downfall of the Soviet state), or for the direction of and investment in various industries (consider the importance of the state in what is arguably the single most important industry in the world economy, namely the commercial aviation industry-the recent American crisis over European state investment in Airbus Industrie stands out as an example of the de-socialization that Jameson discusses in his essay). For some of the authors in this volume, recent developments require an urgent recasting or at least a rethinking of some of the fundamental assumptions of Marxism itself. Other authors, however, insist on the need to retain certain Marxian categories which are indispensable for interrogations of the contemporary world. By any account, though, the staggering developments of recent years, not least those in the mode of production itself, necessitate some pause for reflection on almost all our previous theoretical tools and paradigms. It is useful here to bear in mind Dipesh Chakrabarty's proposal that it would be more productive not simply to see how we can "save" Marxism for the demands of the present, but rather to see how Marxism helps us to understand the contemporary world (a term that is itself fraught with theoretical and political tensions, as Chakrabarty points out). With the rise of what Negri calls "the social worker" and what Virno emphasizes as the role of the "general intellect," the contemporary mode of production, in its sheer scale, speed, and astonishing complexity, requires a new flexibility in analysis. How, for example, are we to make sense of a mode of production on a global scale that combines the latest technologies with various reincarnations of archaic production processes? Taken together, Paolo Virno's discussion of the sense in which abstract knowledge has become "nothing less than the productive force," Peter Hitchcock's attempt to rethink the status of the workers of the world, and Kathi Weeks's foregrounding of labor as a key problematic for materialist critique are particularly pertinent when we consider such recent marvels of "mass customizing" manufacturing technology as the Levi's jeans that are now custom-made to order-individually produced by the virtual tailors of their manufacturing software-or the Motorola beepers that one can order in a variety of styles and colors (the individual customer's order is relayed directly to the manufacturing plant). Thus, Marxism has now to account for the implications not only for capital but for labor of new regimes of production. In some manufacturing plants, such as those of Compaq and BMW, the old Taylorist assembly line has been

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INTRODUCTION

replaced by more flexible production systems in which highly skilled individual workers are responsible for the assembly of whole components, so that new Compaq computers and BMW sedans are hand-assembled by virtual artisans. Meanwhile, new information-processing design systems are being introduced, such as the one behind the brand-new Boeing 777, the first commercial airliner to be designed entirely with CAD-CAM software. Whereas previous aircraft were first put together in a mockup, in which the material "rough draft" versions of the various bits and pieces planned in theory could be double-checked, measured and redesigned if necessary to take into account any practical deviations from theory, there was no such mockup for the 777, so that the first one assembled was a fully functioning flying machine, a unity-of-theory-and-practice, put together from parts designed on Boeing's computer, relayed to production facilities all over the world, and finally brought together for the first time for assembly by Boeing's workers in Seattle. Pointing to the exigencies of long-term structural unemployment as well as the dislocations of the working class in such globlalized post-Fordist or flexible production regimes, Hitchcock argues for the urgency with which we must regard the development of a theoretical framework for analyzing "worker cultures" that can move beyond the confines of nation or region. Indeed, this discussion of the internal divisions of worker subjectivity is complemented by Kathi Weeks's analysis of labour as a basis for the construction of models of subjectivity. At the same time, it is one of the imperatives for a contemporary Marxism that it be able to understand and make sense of the non-productive flows and movements of capital itself-witness for example the recent crisis in the Mexican peso, which, although it followed on the heels of the Zapatista peasant uprising in the winter of 1994, had and has as much to do with the dynamics of global capital flows as it did with the question of land reform in Mexico itself. The troubles of the Mexican bolsa led to turbulence in financial markets all over the world, but particularly in the so-called "emerging markets" so dear to the whiz-kids of Wall Street and the city of London; indeed, as we learned recently, Chase Manhattan Bank demanded that the Mexican government "eliminate" the Zapatistas in order to restore investor confidence in Mexico. 9 Pointing to the dreaded "t" word (i.e., totality), Peter Hitchcock also argues that "the diversity of local strategies of late capitalism underlines rather than negates the necessity of global critique." Indeed, there is an urgent need to articulate what he calls "a cultural condition of globalized resistance in localized formations." It is precisely of such forms of resistance that Maivan Lam speaks in her analysis of the anticapitalist struggles of indigenous peoples. One of the key questions that Lam's essay raises is in effect the supercession of the old 10caVglobal distinction, which in a properly global world system no longer has much meaning any longer. It is thus in the darkness of the "within" that no longer has a "without" that we must locate strategies of resistance.

Marxism Beyond Marxism?

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It is here that we must bear in mind one of the most compelling points raised by Arif Dirlik in his essay on Mao. For, as he argues, Mao's Marxism "forces us to rethink Marxism as a globaV universal discourse." What Dirlik proposes as a corrective to this totalizing tendency in Marxism is that we regard Mao's Marxism as representing a local (or what he calls a "vernacular") version of a universal Marxism. Far from reifying the old locaVglobal dichotomy, however, Dirlik's essay represents a significant undermining of that dichotomy. For in these terms, Mao's Marxism should not just be seen as a third world adaptation of a First World Marxism, nor yet as a local deviation from a universal standard Marxism, but rather as an intervention in Marxism itself, at once "globally" and "locally." Dipesh Chakrabarty argues a similar point, and indeed for both Chakrabarty and Dirlik this question has as much to do with our understanding and writing of history as it does with our understanding of Marxism itself. Just as "real" labor cannot be thought of outside the problematic of "abstract" labor, Chakrabarty argues, "subaltern history cannot be thought outside the global narrative of capital (including the narrative of the transition to capitalism)." In other words, questions of temporality and history are inseparable from the "local/global" ambivalence that turns up in other essays in this collection. Because of this Chakrabarty insists that the "resistance" to capitalist universalism of which the Subaltern Studies project speaks "is something that can happen only within the time-horizon of capital, and yet it disrupts the unity of that time .... " What becomes clear, then, is that there are several ways of totalizing; and that it is crucial to bear in mind the exigencies of "localized formations" even as we search for a "global" or total critique of the world system-exigencies that do not trap us in the old local/global dichotomy but rather that allow us to see the interpenetration of "local" and "global." This does not undermine the possibility of totalizing critiques; rather, it highlights the role that specificities must play in totalizing theorizations. One of the recurring themes in this volume is the question of totality as a category for Marxism and how this category enables a totalizing critique of capitalism (one that must also take into account the diversity of issues, including race, ethnicity, and sexuality, that are not reducible to capitalism, but which get caught up and redefined by it). One of the most potent of Rosemary Hennessy's criticisms of Laclau's and Mouffe's "postmarxism," for example, is that the latter limit the "radical" dimension of their "radical democracy" to cultural and political changes which "leave capitalist divisions of labour unscathed." What is missing from such a theoretical mode, then, is any systematic analysis of capitalism itself. Yet this is not necessarily because the various "postmarxists" no longer believe in capitalism as such; as Jameson writes, while certain versions of "postmarxism" argue that we should now think in terms of a post-capitalist society, certain others believe that something like capitalism still exists, but in a more benign form, one that is more responsive to

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popular needs and hence that no longer requires us to think in terms of radical systemic changes. Still others argue that capitalism does indeed still exist, but that "its capacity for producing wealth and for ameliorating the lot of its subjects has been significantly underestimated (particularly by the Marxists)." Jameson insists that it is a mistake to suppose that the historically original dynamics of capitalism have undergone an evolutionary restructuration, or that capitalism has somehow transcended itself. The collection of essays gathered in this volume represents nothing less than an attempt to critically rethink Marxism as a problematic at a crucial point in its own historical development as well as in the development of its antagonistic opposite, namely capitalism. For despite the declarations heard from various quarters that the "victory of capitalism" and the "end of communism" somehow equal the demise of Marxism, the essays gathered here reaffirm that these latest developments in a now truly global capitalism make Marxism-as the critique of capitalism-more relevant than ever before. And yet, to go back to something we said earlier, if Marxism cannot help us imagine radical alternatives to the current world system, then perhaps it must be willing to abandon its claims to revolutionary praxis. It is with this historical conundrum that we again turn to Marxism today: if it cannot help us imagine alternatives to the current world system, then perhaps it must be willing to abolish itself as a theory of the future, all the while retaining its relevance for a critical apprehension of the present. Yet we believe Marxism to have been never before so relevant for communism precisely because it continues to be that paradoxical problematic which finds in capital both its object and its medium of knowledge. Perhaps, finally, this is why we have attempted in this volume at once to produce and to map the beyonds of Marxism: for one cannot afford to sit still and unchanged when capital runs and changes so fast (just like those computer and biological viruses whose global proliferations and mutations, enabled by the planetary communications system, we have heard so much about in recent months). This collection may then serve as a warning against most of the present estimates of Marxism, which range from contemptuous dismissal to untroubled domestication; a warning against the obliteration of the uncanny, multiform, refractory and communist others of and within-and beyond-capital. -The Editors

NOTES The editors would like to thank Richard Dienst and Michael Hardt for their comments on and criticisms of earlier drafts of this introduction.

1. William Blake, Jerusalem (1804-1820), plate 11.

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2. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793), plates 7 & 8. 3. See Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" (1890), in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), pp. 1079-1104. 4. Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, trans. by Harry Cleaver, et al. (New York: Autonomedia, 1984), p. 4. 5. See Richard Dienst, Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 52-59. 6. See Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring and the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 348-353. Also see Paul Knox and John Agnew, The Geography of the World Economy (London: Edward Arnold, 1994).

7. See "War of the Worlds," in "A Survey of the Global Economy," The Economist, 1 October 1994. 8. Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World, trans. by Michael Wolfers (London: Zed Books, 1990), p. 6. It is useful in this context to bear in mind Castells' suggestion that "within the framework of the new informational economy, a significant part of the world population is shifting from a structural position of exploitation to a structural position of irrelevance." See Castells' article "The Informational Economy and the New International Division of Labor," in Martin Carnoy, et aI., The New Global Economy in the Information Age (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), pp. 15-44. 9. See Ken Silverstein and Alexander Cockburn, "Who Broke Mexico?," The Nation, 6 March 1995.

1 Actually Existing Marxism Fredric Jameson -In memory of Bill Pomerance

has been the occasion for celebrations of the "death of Marxism" in quarters not particularly scrupulous about distinguishing Marxism itself as a mode of thought and analysis, socialism as a political and societal aim and vision, and Communism as a historical movement. The event has clearly enough left its mark on all three of these dimensions, and it can also be agreed that the disappearance of the state power associated with a given idea is likely enough to have an adverse effect on its intellectual prestige. Thus, we are told that enrollment in French courses dropped sharply when General de Gaulle resigned his presidency in 1970; but it would presumably take a more intricate argument to link this decline in intellectual fashion with any more objective deterioration in the "validity" of French itself. In any case, the Left in the West, and Marxism in particular, was in trouble long before the wall came down or the CPUSSR was dissolved, owing to three distinct types of critique: first, a distancing from the political traditions of Marxism-Leninism at least as old as the secession of Maoism in the late 1950s; then, a philosophical "post-Marxism" dating from the late 1960s, in which an emergent new feminism joins forces with a variety of post-structuralisms in the stigmatization of such classical Marxian themes as totality and totalization, telos, the referent, production, and so forth; finally, an intellectual Right, slowly emerging in the course of the 1980s, which seizes on the dissolution of Eastern European communism to affirm the bankruptcy of socialism as such as the definitive primacy of the market. What is more paradoxical is the way in which a remarkable form of mourning-what, alongside that well-known affect called wishful thinking, I am THE END OF THE SOVIET STATE

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tempted to characterize as "wishful regret" -seized on even the least likely suspects, and stole over those currently attempting to squeeze dry the lemon of their hostility to a fantasmatic communism fully as much as over those who always claimed the Soviet Union had nothing whatsoever to do with what they fantasized as genuine socialism in the first place. It was as though, despite assurances to the contrary, in their heart of hearts they still believed that the Soviet Union was capable of evolving into genuine socialism (in hindsight, the last moment for which this seems plausible was the aborted Khrushchev experiment). It is a different kind of wishful regret from the one that saw in the existence and the structure of the communist parties themselves (particularly in the West) a flawed political instrument without which we would, however, be poorer (and at best merely in a position to evolve more rapidly into the classic two-party system of the Western liberal states). Nor are the various national situations often given much attention in this context. The end of socialism (for we have now slipped insensibly into that version of received opinion) always seems to exclude China: perhaps the fact that it still has the highest economic growth rate in the world has led Westerners to imagine (incorrectly) that it is already capitalist. The informed will reserve an expression of real pathos for the disappearance of East Germany, which seemed for the briefest of moments to offer a chance at a radically different kind of social experiment. As for Cuba, one can only feel rage at the prospect of the systematic undermining and destruction of one of the great successful and creative revolutionary projects; but then, it is not over yet, and if Cuba offers the lesson, on the one hand, of the intensified dilemmas of "socialism in one country" within the new global system, if not, indeed, the impossibility of autonomy for any national or regional area (socialist or not), it also raises the question of social democracy, or of a mixed economy, in a backhand way by forcing us to wonder what you are supposed to call something that is supposed to have ceased being socialist, without for all that having developed into anything structurally classifiable as capitalist (the political dimension, and the qualification of parliamentary democracy, are complete red herrings here). But the new market doxa now shuts off the substantive task of theorizing the possibility of a "mixed economy," since the latter is now most often seen negatively as the tenacious survival of older forms of governmental involvement, rather than as a specific and positive form of economic organization in its own right. But this effectively excludes the possibility of social democracy itself as an original solution, and as anything more than an impartial administrator of capital in the interests of all of its fractions (Aronowitz). In any case in recent years no social democratic governments have come to power anywhere that did not capitulate to doctrines of fiscal responsibility and budget austerity. Nonetheless, whatever identifies itself as a purer or more authentic left than the socialist parties should also find time to mourn the end of social democracy

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as well. Social democracy has a historic function, and its victories should be welcomed for more fundamental reasons than the achievements of some Scandinavian countries, along with the relief most people feel when after long conservative administration its parties finally come to power (although that is itself no small thing). The social democratic program has a pedagogical value which emerges from its very failures when these are able to be perceived as structurally necessary and inevitable within the system: it thus shows what the system is incapable of achieving and confirms the principle of totality to be outlined below. That politically educative value is, to be sure, considerably diminished when social democracy capitulates of its own free will; something that should, rather, provide the demonstration that even minimal demands for economic justice cannot be achieved within the market framework by committed and "liberal," let alone "socialist," people and movements. What is certain is that the collapse of the Eastern European party states (while confirming Wallerstein's prescient assessment of them as anti-systemic, rather than as constituting the nucleus of some new world system in their own right) has been everywhere accompanied by what Christopher Hill calls "the experience of defeat." This mood is worth generalizing well out beyond the despair that people have felt before at other moments of some palpable and absolute "end of history"; and it is also to be distinguished from the astonishing spectacle of the opportunism of so many left intellectuals, for whom the matter seems to have boiled down to the question of whether socialism works or not, like a car, so that your main concern is what to replace it with if it does not work (ecology? religion? old-style scholarly research?). Anyone who thought the dialectic was a lesson in historical patience, as well as those few remaining Utopian idealists who may still harbor the conviction that what is unrealized is better than what is real or even than what is possible, will have been too astonished to be depressed by the rush of Marxist intellectuals for the door; and no doubt surprised at themselves as well for having assumed that left intellectuals were leftists first and foremost rather than intellectuals. But Marxism has always been distinguished from other forms of radicalism and populism by the absence of anti-intellectualism; so it is necessary to specify that the situation of the intellectual is always difficult and problematic in the absence of mass movements (something American leftists have had to confront far more often than their counterparts elsewhere); and that this kind of left opportunism is better explained by the more pervasive atmosphere of immediate returns generated by present-day society. The demands thereby encouraged are difficult to square with one of the fundamental peculiarities of human history, namely that human time, individual time, is out of synch with socioeconomic time, and in particular with the rhythms or cycles-the socalled Kondratiev waves-of the capitalist mode of production itself, with its brief windows of opportunity that open onto collective praxis, and its incomprehensible inhuman periods of fatality and insurmountable misery. One does

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not have to believe in the mechanical alternations of progressive and reactionary periods (although the market cycles do justify such alterations to a certain degree) to understand that, as biological organisms of a certain life span, we are poorly placed as biological individuals to witness the more fundamental dynamics of history, glimpsing only this or that incomplete moment, which we hasten to translate into the all-too-human terms of success or failure. But neither stoic wisdom nor the reminder of a longer-term view are really satisfactory responses to this peculiar existential and epistemological dilemma, comparable to the science-fictional one of beings inhabiting a cosmos they do not have organs to perceive or identify. Perhaps only the acknowledgment of this radical incommensurability between human existence and the dynamics of collective history and production is capable of generating some new ethic, whereby we deduce the absent totality that makes a mockery of us, without relinquishing the fragile value of our own personal experience; capable, as well, of generating new kinds of political attitudes, new kinds of political perception, as well as of political patience; and new methods for decoding the age as well, and reading the imperceptible tremors within it of an inconceivable future. Meanwhile, it was not merely Wallerstein who was right about the failure of the Bolshevik and the Stalinist experiments to develop into the enclave from which a whole new global system would develop; it was a certain Marx as well (the Marx of the Grundrisse, perhaps, more than of the more triumphalist passages of Capital), who tirelessly insisted on the significance of the world market as the ultimate horizon of capitalism, and thereby on the principle, not merely that socialist revolution would be a matter of high productivity and of the most advanced development, rather than of rudimentary modernization, but also that it would have to be worldwide. The end of national autonomy, in the world system of late capitalism, seems far more radically to exclude episodic social experiments than did the modern period (where they survived, after all, for a considerable number of years). To be sure, conceptions of national autonomy and autarchy are very unpopular today indeed, and are energetically discredited by the media, who tend to associate them with the late Kim il Sung and his doctrine of ju-che. This is perhaps reassuring for countries intent, like India or Brazil, on abandoning their national autonomy; but we must not give up the attempt to imagine what the consequences of trying to secede from the world market could be and what kind of politics would be necessary to do so. For there is also the question of what secures such an implacable integration of the new world market, and this is a question whose answer, above and beyond the development of a dependence on imports and the destruction of local production, must surely today be largely cultural, as we shall see later on. This longing to be integrated into the world market is clearly enough perpetuated by world information circuits and exported entertainment (mainly from Hollywood and American television), which not only reinforce just such international consumerist styles but even more importantly block the formation of

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autonomous and alternative cultures based on different values or principles (or else, as in the case of the socialist countries, undermine whatever possibilities for the emergence of such an autonomous culture might have hitherto existed). This clearly enough makes culture (and commodity reification theory) into a far more central political issue than it ever was in previous moments of capitalism; at the same time, while suggesting a relative redistribution of the significance of ideology under other more influential cultural practices, it confirms Stuart Hall's idea of "discursive struggle" as the primary mode in which ideologies are legitimated and delegitimated today. The saturation with a culture of consumerism was accompanied by the systematic delegitimation of slogans and concepts ranging from nationalization and welfare all the way to economic rights and socialism itself, once thought to be not merely possible but also desirable, yet today universally held to be chimerical by an omnipresent cynical reason. Whether cause or effect, this delegitimation of the very language and conceptuality of socialism (and its replacement by a nauseatingly complacent market rhetoric) has clearly played a fundamental role in the current "end of history." But the experience of defeat, which includes all these things but transcends them all, has even more to do with the well-nigh universal feeling of powerlessness that has dawned on an immense range of social strata around the globe since the end of the 1960s, a deeper conviction as to the fundamental impossibility of any form of real systemic change in our societies. This is often expressed as a perplexity in the identification of agencies of change, of whatever type; and it takes the form of a sense of the massive permanent and non- or post-human immutability of our immeasurably complex institutions (despite their own ceaseless metamorphoses), which are most often imagined in highor late-technological terms. The result is an instinctive belief in the futility of all forms of action or praxis, and a millennial discouragement which can account for the passionate adherence to a variety of other substitutes and alternative solutions: most notably to religious fundamentalism and nationalism, but also to the whole range of passionate involvements in local initiatives and actions (and single-issue politics), as well as the consent to the inevitable implied by the hysterical euphoria in visions of some delirious pluralism of late capitalism with its alleged authorization of social difference and "multiculturalism." What seems important to stress here is the gap between technology and economics (just as we will observe Marxism elsewhere to insist on the distance between the political and the economic or the social). Technology is indeed something like the cultural logo or preferred code of the third stage of capitalism: in other words, it is late capitalism's own preferred mode of self-representation, the way it would like us to think about itself. And this mode of presentation secures the mirage of autonomization and the feeling of powerlessness already described: in much the same way in which old-fashioned mechanics no longer have anything to say about automobile motors organized

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around computer programs. It is, however, crucial to distinguish between this technological appearance, which is of course equally a cultural phenomenon, and the socioeconomic structure of late capitalism that still corresponds to Marx's analyses. In saying so, however, I anticipate the substance of the present essay, which will recapitulate the relevance of Marxism for our current situation, and will thereby need to deal with the following topics: 1) what is Marxism then exactly, if the media and the various right-wing blowhards have it all wrong? 2) what is socialism in that case, and what might it be (or be thought of being) in the future? and, above all, 3) what can the relationship of both be to that supremely stigmatized traditional concept called revolution? 4) what then was communism, and what happened to it? 5) and lastly, and as a logical conclusion to all of the above, what is late capitalism and what does Marxism imply for any of the new politics that can be expected to accompany it? what new theoretical tasks does late capitalism set for the new or third-stage Marxism that has begun to emerge along with it?

What is Marxism? Or if you prefer, what is Marxism not? It is not, in particular, a nineteenth-century philosophy, as some people (from Foucault to Kolakowski) have suggested, although it certainly emerged from nineteenthcentury philosophy (but you could just as easily argue that the dialectic is itself an unfinished project, which anticipates modes of thought and reality that have not yet come into existence even today). In part, this answer can be justified by the assertion that Marxism is not in that sense a philosophy at all; it designates itself, with characteristic cumbersomeness, as a "unity-of-theory-and-practice" (and if you knew what that was, it would be clear that it shares this peculiar structure with Freudianism). But it may be clearest to say that it can best be thought of as a problematic: that is to say, it can be identified, not by specific positions (whether of a political, economic or philosophical type), but rather by the allegiance to a specific complex of problems, whose formulations are always in movement and in historic rearrangement and restructuration, along with their object of study (capitalism itself). One can therefore just as easily say that what is productive in the Marxian problematic is its capacity to generate new problems (as we will observe it to do in the most recent encounter, with late capitalism); nor can the various dogmatisms historically associated with it be traced to any particular fatal flaw in that problem-field, although it is clear that Marxists have not been any freer of the effects of intellectual reification than anyone else, and have, for example, consistently thought that base-and-superstructure was a solution and a concept, rather than a problem and a dilemma, just as they have persistently

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assumed that something called "materialism" was a philosophical or ontological position, rather than the general sign for an operation which we might term de-idealization, an operation both interminable in Freud's classic sense and also unrealizable on any permanent basis and for any durable length of time (inasmuch as it is idealism which is the most comfortable assumption for everyday human thought). The initial problematic of Marxism developed around the specificities-the structural and historical peculiarities-of the production of value in industrial capitalism: it took as its central conceptual space that phenomenon of surplus value, which offered the signal advantage of being able to be multiply transcoded. That is to say, that the problem of surplus value could be translated into a number of seemingly distinct problems and areas which corresponded to specialized languages and disciplines, many of which did not yet exist at the time in their current academic form. Surplus value could be approached, for example, through the phenomenon of commodity production, leading on into the social psychology of commodities and consumerism (or what Marx called "commodity fetishism"). It could also be tracked out into the area of money theory (banks, inflation, speculation, the stock market, not to speak of what Simmel calls the "philosophy" of money). It transforms itself, in the most astonishing of mythological mutations, into the living and breathing presence of the social classes themselves. It leads a second or shadow life under legal forms and juridical categories (and in particular in the various historical, traditional and modern forms of property relationships). Its very existence calls forth the central dilemmas of modern historiography (as the narrative of its own emergence and its various destinies). Surplus value has most often been thought of-a thought which we might therefore have some interest in resisting or postponing-as a matter of economics, which has, for Marxism, most often taken the form of an investigation of crisis and of the falling rate of profit, and of the implications and consequences of the fundamental mechanism of capital accumulation (the economics of possible or feasible socialisms also belongs here). Last but not least, the concept would seem to authorize-but also to require-any number of theories of ideology and of culture, and to take as its ultimate horizon the world market (as the outer limit of its structural tendency to accumulate), including the dynamics of imperialism and its later equivalents (neo-colonialism, hyperimperialism, the world system). The transmutation of the notion of surplus value into these very different disciplinary languages or fields of specialization constitutes the problematic of Marxism as an articulated conceptual space (which one could map), and can also account for the variability of any number of specifically Marxist ideologies and political programs or strategies. The crises in the Marxian paradigm, then, have always come punctually at those moments in which its fundamental object of study---capitalism as a system-has seemed to change its spots, or to undergo unforeseen and

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unpredictable mutations. Since the old articulation of the problematic no longer corresponds to this new configuration of realities, the temptation is strong to conclude that the paradigm itself-after the Kuhnian fashion of the sciences-has been overtaken and outmoded (with the implication that a new one needs to be devised, if it is not already taking shape). This is what happened in 1898, when Eduard Bernstein's The Presuppositions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy proposed radically to "revise" Marxism in the light of its alleged failure to do justice to the complexity of the modern social classes as well as to the adaptability of contemporary capitalism. Bernstein advised the abandonment of the Hegel-derived dialectic along with the notion of revolution itself, and the consequent reorganization of Second International politics around mass democracy and the electoral process. It is very precisely these features of the first "post-Marxism" that reappeared in the 1970s of our own era, when more sophisticated versions of that diagnosis and its prescription alike begin to reappear in ever greater numbers (no single pronouncement marks this cyclical reappearance of post-Marxism as dramatically as Bernstein's, but Hindess and Hirst's 1977 book on Capital may be taken as a first swallow, while Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy of 1985 shows the migration in full course across the sky). The emphases of these various post-Marxisms (whether they still attempt to cling to the named tradition or rather call for its outright liquidation) vary according to the way they stage the fate of the object it was the vocation of Marxism to analyze in the first place, namely capitalism itself. They may for example argue that classical capitalism no longer exists, and has given way to this or that "post-capitalism" (Daniel Bell's idea of a "post-industrial society" is one of the most influential versions of this strategy), in which the features enumerated by Marx-but most particularly the dynamic of antagonistic social classes and the primacy of the economic (or of the "base" or "infrastructure" )-no longer exist (Bell's post-capitalism is essentially organized by scientific knowledge and run by scientific "philosopher-kings"). Or one can try to defend the idea that something like capitalism still exists, but has become more benign and has for whatever reason (reliance on more widespread commodity consumption, mass literacy, an enlightened awareness of its own interest) become more responsive to the popular will and to collective needs; so that it is no longer necessary to posit radical systemic changes, let alone revolution. This is, or so one supposes, the position of the various surviving social democratic movements. Finally, it can be maintained that capitalism does indeed still exist, but that its capacity for producing wealth and for ameliorating the lot of its subjects has been significantly underestimated (particularly by the Marxists); indeed, that capitalism is today the only viable road to modernization and universal improvement, if not affluence. This is of course the rhetoric of the market people, and it seems to have won out over the other two arguments in recent years

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(although they are all affiliated and far from being mutually exclusive). Far more plausible is the counterposition to this one, propounded most dramatically by Robert Kurz in books like The Collapse of Modernization (Frankfurt, 1992), namely that it is precisely the capacity for producing new surplus value-in other words, the capacity for modernization in the classic sense of industrialization and investment-that has disappeared in late capitalism. Capitalism may thus well have triumphed, but its outcome is increasingly marked by dizzying paper-money speculation on the one hand, and new forms of "immiseration" on the other, in structural unemployment and in the consignment of vast tracts of the Third World to permanent unproductivity. If this is so, the situation would presumably also call for some kind of post-Marxism, but of an utterly different kind from that deduced by the more optimistic view of capitalism outlined above. Before analyzing the historical significance of the various post-Marxisms, however, it will be appropriate to respond to the views of capitalism on which they are based, which all presume some mutation in the basic structure described by Marx himself. Bell's idea that the dependence of modern business on science and technology has displaced the older capitalist dynamic of profit and competition is surely the easiest to dispose of, in the light of any number of contemporary debates or scandals that turn on the commercial exploitation of scientific products-patents from the rainforest, for example, or the various AIDS drugs-and in the light of the ever more desperate search of the scientists for relatively "disinterested" research funding. Inversely, it can easily be shown that no business in the world today (of whatever nature or complexity) is at liberty to suspend the profit motive even locally: in fact, we can witness its global generalization in the reorganization of areas hitherto relatively exempt from the more intense pressures to postmodernizeareas that range from old-fashioned book publishing to village agriculture, where the old ways are ruthlessly extirpated, and high-powered monopolies reorganize everything on a purely formal basis (in other words, in terms of profit or investment return) with no regard to the content of the activity. It is a process that takes place within the relatively more underdeveloped enclaves in the advanced countries (often cultural or agricultural) as well as accompanying the penetration of capital into hitherto uncommodified zones in the rest of the world. So it is a mistake to suppose that the historically original dynamics of capitalism have undergone a mutation or an evolutionary restructuration; and the ongoing drive to maximize profit-or in other words to accumulate capital as such (not as a personal motivation, in other words, but rather a structural feature of the system, its necessity to expand)-can be seen to be accompanied by other equally familiar features from mankind's recent past: the vicissitudes of the business cycle, the fluctuations of the labor market, including massive unemployment and capital flight, and the destructiveness of the ever increasing tempo of industrial and technological change, albeit on a global scale that

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makes such persistent features seem unprecedented. About democracy, and in addition to the inveterate failures and capitulations of social democracy that have already been mentioned, it is enough to observe the ever more systematic servility of all governments today in the face of business orthodoxies (balancing the budget, for example, or IMF policies generally), to come rapidly to the conclusion that the system brooks no collective demands that are likely to interfere with its operations (this is not to suggest that it can ever operate very smoothly). Less than ever, now that the Soviet Union has disappeared, are episodic attempts tolerated which show the intent to chart an autonomous national course or to shift the priorities of government economic policy in any dramatic way that might injure business interests: the Allende coup is the paradigmatic response to these ever more enfeebled velleities of populism or national independence. As for the market, its rhetoric is of course an ideology, which mobilizes belief with a view towards action and political results. It seems just as plausible to believe in the apocalyptic scenario whereby the market will dramatically fail to improve the lives of two-thirds of those living on the globe; but as a matter of fact this scenario is also furnished (for the price of one!) by the market people themselves, who sometimes like to outline those parts of the world (Africa, the poorer countries of Eastern Europe), that will never successfully feel the beneficent modernizing effect of the appropriate market conditions. What they omit is the role of the new world system itself in this desperate pauperization of whole populations on a global scale. I take it therefore as axiomatic that capitalism has not fundamentally changed today, any more than it can be thought to have done in Bernstein's period. But it should be equally clear that the resonance of Bernstein's revisionism, as well as the persuasiveness of a whole range of contemporary post-Marxisms, is no mere epiphenomenon either, but a cultural and ideological reality which itself demands historical explanation: indeed, insofar as all such positions centrally imply a breakdown in the very explanatory powers of an older Marxism in the face of the new developments, it would be best if the explanation were itself a Marxian one, and thereby a vindication in this respect as well. We have mentioned in passing one of the fundamental features of Marx's analysis of capitalism, namely that capital must ceaselessly expand, it can never call it a day and sit back to rest on its achievements: the accumulation of capital must be enlarged, the rate of productivity constantly increased, with all the well-known results of perpetual transformation, wholesale trashing and fresh construction, and the like ("all that's solid ... "). Furthermore, capitalism is also supposed to be contradictory and constantly to paint itself over and over again into corners in which it confronts the law of the falling rate of profit in the form of diminishing returns, stagnation, unproductive flurries of speculation, and so forth. Because these effects largely derive from overproduction and from the saturation of available markets, Ernest Mandel has (in Late

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Capitalism) suggested not only that capital tends to extricate itself by technological innovation that reopens those markets for products of wholly new kinds, but also that the system as a whole has had thus to rejuvenate itself at several crisis points in its three-hundred-year-old career. Meanwhile, positing a somewhat longer time period, Giovanni Arrighi (in The Long Twentieth Century) has detected the presence of a phase of speculation and finance capital very similar to what we today observe in the First World, at the close of each of the ever-expanding cycles of the world system (Spanish-Genoese, Dutch, English and now American). For Mandel, it is the introduction of radically new kinds of technology that rescues capitalism from its cyclical crisis, but which also, along with a shift in its center of gravity, determines a convulsive enlargement of the system as a whole and the extension of its logic and its hegemony dramatically over ever vaster areas of the globe. It does not seem to be an accident that these momentous systemic transmutations should correspond faithfully to the emergence of the moments of a post-Marxism which have already been mentioned. Bernstein's was the age of imperialism (Lenin's monopoly stage), in which along with the new technologies of electricity and the combustion engine, and the new modes of organization of the trust and the cartel, the market system was itself projected out beyond the "advanced" nation states in a relatively systemic carving up of the globe into European and North American colonies and spheres of influence. The extraordinary mutations in the realm of culture and consciousness, familiar to students in various disciplines of the human sciences-the emergence of modernism in all the arts, preceded by the twin harbingers of naturalism and symbolism, the discovery of psychoanalysis, echoed by a variety of unfamiliar new forms of thought in the sciences, vitalism and machinism in philosophy, the apotheosis of the classical city, alarming new types of mass politics-all of these late nineteenth-century innovations, whose ultimate links with the infra structural modifications we have mentioned can be demonstrated, now seemed to propose and to demand modifications in an essentially nineteenth-century Marxism itself (that of the Second International). The moment of the first post-Marxism is thus that of the Modern, or modernism, in general (if we follow the scheme according to which a first, national-capitalist period, from the French Revolution on, is termed a moment of "realism," or secularization; while the latest moment of capitalism, the restructuration of capitalism in the nuclear and the cybernetic age, is now generally referred to as "postmodern"). Bernstein's revisionism can today be seen as a response to changes in content associated with this momentous transition between the first (internal-national) and second (modern or imperialist) stages of capitalism: even though only the effects of the new imperialist system (set into place around 1885) are registered in Bernstein's analysis of the increasing prosperity of the working class, the appearance of innumerable class fractions unlikely to identify directly with it, and the shift in stress to political aims (an

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enlargement of democracy) rather than socioeconomic ones. (Indeed, imperialism will only enter the debate in the Second International a few years later, around the time of the First World War, with Kautsky's notion of "ultra-imperialism"the union of all the imperialist rivals against their "Others"-which today seems extraordinarily prophetic of our own situation). The first post-Marxism, in other words, drew plausible conclusions about the inadequacy of the traditional Marxian problematic on the basis of internal social conditions, without attention to the enlargement of the international, or global, frame, itself instrumental in modifying those conditions in the first place. (Lenin's notion of the corruption and complicity of the First-World proletariat by an internal prosperity owed to imperialism itself is a rather crude corrective to this narrow focus). But the precedent of Bernstein's revisionism allows us new insights into our own contemporary post-Marxisms, which begin to emerge, in analogous fashion, at the very moment in which one stage of capitalism (now the imperialist stage itself) begins to give way to another one, involving new technologies and also an immensely expanded world scale. Indeed, the beginning of the nuclear age and of cybernetics and information technology on every level of social life, from the quotidian to the organization of industry and warfare as such, coincides with the end of the older colonial system and with a worldwide decolonization that has taken the form of a system of immense transnational corporations mostly affiliated to the three centers of the new world system (the U.S., Japan, and Western Europe). Expansion in this third or postmodern age of capitalism has thus not taken the form of geographical exploration and territorial claims but rather the more intensive colonization of the older areas of capitalism and the postmodernization of the newer ones, the saturation with commodities and the remarkable post-geographical and post-spatial informational simultaneity that weaves a web far finer and more minute and all-pervasive than anything imaginable in the older semaphore routes of cable and newspaper and even those of airplane and radio. From this perspective it can be argued that just as Bernstein's revisionism was a symptom and a consequence of social changes that resulted from the organization of classical imperialism-or in other words, a reflex of modernism and modernization as such-so also contemporary post-Marxisms have found their justification in extraordinary modifications of social reality under late capitalism: from the "democratization" resulting from the emergence of all kinds of "new social movements" and subject-positions into an immensely expanded media space (if not exactly "public sphere" in the classical sense) to a worldwide restructuration of industrial production that has paralyzed national labor movements and problematized the very concept of the local itself (living your whole life in one place, with one job or career, in a relatively stable institutional and urban setting). It is changes on this level that have led the post-Marxisms variously to insist on the irrelevance of a stable idea of

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social class, on the unworkability of the older party politics and the delusions of the classical concept of revolution as the "seizure of power," on the outmodedness of concepts of production as well in the era of mass consumption and the theoretical disintegration of labor theories of value in the face of information bits. I leave out of the picture here the more abstruse philosophical polemics, around the now allegedly discredited and "Hegelian" notion of contradiction, in a world of sheer surface differences; on the stigmatization of the idea of a telos as just another bourgeois conception of progress (both concepts unseasonable at the end of history and in a world in which deep temporality and all kinds of ideas of the future as such have seemed extinct); polemics against notions of ideology and false consciousness as well (but also, more tactfully, against the Freudian unconscious itself) in a stream of Deleuzian flux inhabited by all kinds of decentered subjects. It is clear that each of these critical themes has something significant to tell us about changes in social life today, if it is examined as a conceptual symptom rather than as a feature of some new postmodern doxa. But it should also be clear that, like Bernstein's critical vision, a fresh contemporary focus has been bought at the price of the totality or of the global frame itself, whose shifts constitute the invisible but operative coordinates in which local empirical phenomena can alone be evaluated. For it is only within the structure of the third phase, the new world system, of capitalism itself that the emergence of the new internal-existential or empirical-social-phenomena can be understood: and this is clearer today, in a greatly enlarged world system, than it was in Bernstein's time, when "imperialism" could still be grasped externally and extrinsically, as something outside domestic national experience. Today, it is clearer than ever before that late capitalism defines itself at one and the same time in its global dynamics as well as in its internal effects: indeed the former now seem to impose a return on the latter, as when we speak of the way in which an "internal Third World" and a process of internal colonization has seemed to eat away at the First World itself. Here the view of Marx the theoretician of the world market (particularly in the Grundrisse) not only supersedes current post-Marxisms, but can be seen as essential to the analysis of the earlier stages of capitalism as well. But it is a dialectical view of the continuities of capitalism that is proposed here, in place of an overestimation of the latter's breaks and discontinuities: for it is the continuity in the deeper structure that imposes the experiential differences generated as that structure convulsively enlarges with each new phase.

II

About socialism ("the death of"), as distinguished from Soviet communism as a historical development, a word needs to be said in honor of its necessity as a

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political, social, and imaginative ideal (which would have to be reinvented should it ever suffer extinction); as a future program which is also a Utopian vision and the space of a radical and systemic alterative to the present social system. The incidentals generally thought to be "socialist" in the generic sense seem to come and go in predictable rhythms: so that it is only apparently a paradox that at the very moment in which the "Soviet model" has seemed utterly discredited, the American public seemed on the point of seriously reconsidering the possibility of a somewhat more socialized medicine for the first time in forty years. As for nationalization, itself long since a casualty of "discursive struggle" and a slogan even the most orthodox socialists have been reluctant to brandish in publish, its reappearance in all kinds of unexpected situations and contexts cannot be precluded (although it seems possible that it will be right-wing or business governments that find strategic nationalizations useful for cutting their own costs). In any event, the denunciation of government intervention by market rhetoricians is rendered ludicrous by the omnipresent prestige of the Japanese model, in which government intervention is so prominent as to suggest that the system as a whole might well be characterized as state-managed capitalism. Meanwhile, after the ReaganIThatcher period, in which private business celebrated orgies of a type not witnessed since the gilded age of the previous century, the trend seems to be flowing back towards a reinterrogation of the minimal social responsibilities that must be assumed by the state in any advanced industrial society; here the continental and in particular the German tradition of a welfare state dating back to Bismarck has been obscured by Cold War polemics but now seems in the process of becoming visible again against the rhetoric of privatization sponsored by Anglo-American capital. At the same time, and despite the experimental ideas of the Clinton administration about private investment in ecological industries and technology, it would seem ever clearer that ecological reform can only be achieved by the state itself, and that the market is structurally inadequate to the immense changes required not merely by control and limitation of existing industrial technologies but also by the revolution in daily life and consumption habits such limitations would require for their motivation and enforcement. Ecology has at times been seen to be in tension with socialism as a political objective, particularly where the latter has brandished a rhetoric of modernization and a Promethean attitude towards the conquest of nature (which to a certain degree goes back to Marx himself). Nonetheless, any number of disappointed socialists seem to have transferred their political practice to the ecological sphere, so that for a time the Green movements seemed to have replaced the various left political movements as the principal vehicle for opposition in advanced countries. At any rate, what needs to be affirmed here is the dependence of ecological political aims on the existence of socialist governments: it is a logical argument, and has nothing to do with the abuse of nature and the ecology by

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communist governments in the East who were ruthless and desperate in their pursuit of rapid modernization. Rather, it can be determined a priori that the ecological modifications are so expensive, require such massive technology, and also such thoroughgoing enforcement and policing, that they could only be achieved by a strong and determined government (and probably a worldwide government at that). Meanwhile, it should also be understood that the project of an ironically named "transition to capitalism" in the East, is at one with Western "deregulation" and very specifically hostile to all forms of welfare security, dictates the systematic dismantling of all the tattered safety nets still in existence. But this is what has not been generally visible for the citizens of the socialist countries: discounting as propaganda the few truths their governments actually did tell them about the West, they clearly believed that we retained the equivalent of their own safety net, their medical and social services and public education system, while somehow having managed, magically, to add on top of all that the goods, gadgets, drugstores, supermarkets, and video outlets that they now coveted: it seems not to have been clear to them that the conditions for having the latter-the goods-was the systematic renunciation of the former-namely, the social services. This fundamental misunderstanding, which lends the Eastern European stampede towards the market its tragi-comic resonance, also omitted any sense of the difference between the simple availability of commodities and the frenzies of consumerism itself, something like a collective addiction with enormous cultural, social and individual consequences which can only be compared, as a behavioral mechanism, to the related addictions of drugs, sex and violence (that in fact tend to accompany it). Nothing human can be alien to any of us, of course; and perhaps it was as historically important as it was necessary for human society to have gone through the experience of consumerism as a way of life, if only in order more consciously later on to choose something radically different in its place. It should be clear that the features enumerated above-nationalizations, government interventions of various kinds-scarcely suffice to define the socialist project as such: but at a time when even the welfare state is under attack by the new world market rhetoric, and when people are encouraged to loathe big government and to fantasize about private solutions to social problems, socialists should join with liberals (in the American, centrist sense of the word) to defend big government and to stage their discursive struggle against such attacks. The Welfare State was an achievement; its internal contradictions are those of capitalism itself and not a failure of social and collective concern; at any rate, where it is in the process of being dismantled, it will be important for the Left to seize and articulate the dissatisfactions of ordinary people with the loss of those achievements and that safety net, and not play into the hands of the market rhetoricians. Big government should be a positive slogan; bureaucracy itself needs to be rescued from its stereotypes, and reinvoked in

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the terms of the service and class commitment it has had at certain other moments of bourgeois society (while reminding people that the largest bureaucracies are in any case those of the big corporations). Finally, it is crucial to undercut the use of private or personal analogies-one's own monthly income and budget, "spending beyond your means," etc.-for the understanding of national debts and budgets. The problem of paying interest on an enormous national debt is a problem of the world monetary system as a whole, and should be thought of in those terms and analyzed as such. But those are only the necessary reactive strategies for current discursive struggle and for reestablishing a climate in which a properly socialist vision can be projected: for one thing many of these seemingly left-wing or social democratic proposals-that of a guaranteed minimum annual wage, for example-can perfectly well suit the purposes of a Bonapartist or even a fascist right. All the more reason, then, to stress the other absence in merely reactive strategy, namely the failure to name the alternative, to name the solution, fully as much as to "name the system." Not only is it the systematicity of the socialist solutions, the interrelationship of all of the measures proposed within a larger project, that marks the difference between revolution and piecemeal reform; it is also the characterization of such measures as socialism which necessarily draws the line between a genuinely left movement and a left-center, or welfare reformist, politics. In a basic book on the American left (Ambiguous Legacy), James Weinstein indeed demonstrates that as radically different from one another, as virtually unrelated to each other, as were its three high points in modern times-the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs before the First World War, the American Communist Party in the 1930s, the New Left in the 1960s-they all shared a common failing, namely, the conviction that you could not use the word "socialist" to the American people, and that aims, even those which attracted widespread support among the voters, ought always to be disguised as essentially liberal or reformist measures in order not to alienate the American masses. This means that even if achieved, and enshrined in collective popularity, such individual aims are always open to confiscation by centrist movements; and indeed, as in a famous Jules Feiffer cartoon, the main function of the American left generally is to have invented new ideas to replenish the imagination and the political arsenal of an eclectic moderate movement (most often, the Democratic Party itself), whose bankruptcy follows swiftly on the disappearance of its secret source of inspiration. But social democratic or welfare measures cannot contribute politically to the development of socialism unless they are labeled as such: socialism is a total project, whose various components must be registered allegorically, as so many emanations and figures for its central spirit, at the same time that they are justified in their own right, in terms of their own local appropriateness. The collective project always operates on the two levels of the microcosm and the macrocosm, the individual or

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empirical issue in all its burning urgency, and the bigger national or international picture, the micro political here being placed in perspective by the overall totalizing umbrella party or alliance strategy. Yet the line between the critical or reactive and the positive or Utopian, the construction-oriented, runs through both micro- and macro-political levels: discursive struggle, the discrediting of the hegemonic market model, runs out into the sands unless it is accompanied by a prophetic vision of the future, of the radical social alternative, whose problems today are obviously compounded by the discrediting of older "modern" or "modernist" images of socialism or communism (as well as the contemporary emergence, in the gaps left by the latter, of a range of micropolitical and anarchist substitutes). Socialism has surely always meant cradle-to-grave protection for human beings: the ultimate safety net, which provides the beginnings of an existential freedom for everyone by providing a secure human time over and above practicalor material necessity: the beginnings of a true individuality, by making it possible for people to live without the crippling anxieties of self-preservation ("ohne Angst leben," as Adorno, who most abundantly has developed this theme philosophically, characterized music), along with the less widely identified but equally paralyzing anxieties of our powerless yet well-nigh visceral concern for others (the majority of people spoiling their lives, as Oscar Wilde put it in The Soul of Man under Socialism, "by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism," indeed, being "forced so to spoil them"). This is the sense, indeed, in which socialism means guaranteed material life: the right to free education and free health care and retirement support, the right to community and association, let alone grassroots democracy in the most thoroughgoing sense (that of Marx in his lectures on the Paris Commune); the right to work as well-no small thing from the social and political perspective of the present day, in which massive and permanent structural unemployment can be foreseen as a requirement of late capitalist automation; and finally the right to culture and to a "leisure" uncolonized by the formal stereotypicalities and standardizations of current commercial "mass culture." This vision in its turn is ideologically rent and deformed by the seemingly incompatible poles of an existential or individual focus on the one hand (the private alienations of late capitalism, the scars left on individual subjectivity) and a communitarianism on the other, whose essential collective focus is currently in the process of being confiscated by liberal and even right-wing ideologues. Lafargue's scandalous "right to laziness," on the one hand, the Utopias of small agricultural or even Native American tribal communities on the other: such are only some of the thematic terms in which the possibility of imagining socialism is conflicted on the Left itself. Here, clearly enough, the anxiety about Utopia takes the form of an apprehension of repression: that socialism will involve renunciation, that the abstinence from commodities is only a figure for a more generalized puritanism

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and a systemic willed frustration of desire (about which even Marx showed us that capitalism was the latter's stimulant and an immense machine for producing new and unforeseeable desires of all kinds). This is then also the point at which Marcuse's meditation becomes indispensable, posing for the first time since Plato the question of true and false desires, true and false happiness and gratification: it is significant, then, that the repudiation of Marcuse at once takes a political and anti-intellectual form (who is the philosopher-king appointed to adjudicate between the true and the false in these matters, etc?). The paradoxes of the synchronic indeed allow us to grasp, but only from the outside, how difficult it may be to relinquish compensatory desires and intoxications we have developed in order to make the present liveable. The dilemma is not to be solved by debates on human nature, surely, but in terms of a collective decision and a collective will to live in a different way: the freedom necessarily implied by such a collective choice can then respect itself only by acknowledging individual freedoms to opt out or to secede, temperamentally to refuse the pieties of the majority. Meanwhile, it is Marxism's weakness as well as its strength always to find its insistence on the economic (in the broadest and loosest sense) countered by essentially political considerations and worries: indeed, I tend to think that the strength of current free-market rhetoric depends on the use of the image of the market as a symbolic political fantasy rather than a specifically economic program. This particular fear of socialism-the libidinal one, the anxiety about repression-then logically develops into a more openly political concern with power as such. Bakunin was not first to associate socialism with political tyranny and dictatorship (the reproach had already been developed by the Utopian socialists), nor was Wittvogel the last, although his book Oriental Despotism, which juxtaposed Stalin with the god-emperors of the earliest hydraulic civilizations, made a lasting mark on right-wing propaganda. It is probably not enough to observe that government and the state-in whatever political form-always by definition hold the monopoly of force. Yet the reproach does not seem particularly consistent with the equally current right-wing notion that real democracy is ungovernable and that the demands awakened by socialism are likely to bring the social machine to a standstill. To that inconsistency may be added another, historical one: namely the virtually unanimous consensus of this doctrine-that socialism means the absolute state-as a result of the collapse of that state structure and that particular political order in the first place. Most often, however, particularly in the conditions of a market climate and of the momentary hegemony of market rhetoric, the envisioning of socialism and of Utopia must make its way through the ideological conflict between a command society on the one hand and a largely individualistic or atomized, decentered, "invisible hand" society on the other. Even Robert Heilbroner, in his pre-1989 book Marxism: For and Against, speaks up for the vitality of this alternative vision in terms of the collective choice and prioritizing of a relative-

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ly fundamentalist way of life which, like current stereotypes of so-called Islamic fundamentalism, attempts to secede from the world market by way of a kind of ethical puritanism and a libidinal renunciation. It is a vision that places a welcome premium on the possibilities of collective choice no less than on the price to be paid for the achievement of a different kind of social life; at the same time, however, it feeds into deep unconscious fears and anxieties about Utopia itself, and confirms one's sense that any projection of socialist visions today must come to terms with the fear of Utopia fully as much as with the diagnosis of the pathologies of late capitalism. As for the stigmatization of planning as the image of a "command society" libidinally invested with images of Stalinism along with deeper stereotypes of "oriental despotism" that extend back into ancient history (the statist adversaries of the ancient Hebrews and Greeks alike), a beginning might be made with those contemporary endorsements of socialism that attempt to formulate the great collective project in individualistic terms, as a vast social experiment calculated to elicit the development of individual energies and the excitement of a truly modern individualism-as a liberation of individuals by the collective and an exercise in new political possibilities, rather than some ominous social regression to the pre-individualistic and the repressively archaic: here, for example, the great pre-Stalinist Soviet "cultural revolution" might be appealed to as a powerful ideological counterforce. But Heilbroner's defense remains useful to the degree to which it stresses the nature of "Utopia" as an alternative social system, rather than the end of all social systems; and underscores the structural necessity for any social system or mode of production to include mechanisms which as it were immunize the existing system of relationships against destructive or radically transformative novelties (thus, for example, a certain-coincidentally anti-Marxist-anthropo logy took it on itself to demonstrate the ways in which small tribal societies structurally prevent and exclude the accumulation of wealth and the coming into being of power as such and eventually of what will become the state). In particular, the systemic incompatibility between the market and socialism is here presupposed, and was surely confirmed by the destructiveness of the market in Eastern Europe, not merely in the disintegration of social relationships after the collapse of the communist state, but also in the superstructural corruption by commodity fantasies and Western mass culture that preceded that collapse and prepared it. Polyani's strictures on the catastrophic effects of the market can thus today be enlarged to include the devastation of consumerism and of the social and cultural habits of commodification, all of which no doubt presupposes the necessity for any socialist system to generate a culture which somehow neutralizes those influences, but which does so in a vital and positive way, as a collective choice rather than a regime of censorship and secession. At the same time it should be stressed that the violence and physical repression to be observed in the history of the no longer actually exist-

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ing socialisms (and in particular the communist states as such) was always the response to genuine threats from the outside, to right-wing hostility and violence, and to internal and external kinds of subversion (of which the U.S. blockade of Cuba still offers a vivid illustration). Philosophically, the point to be made against the Right is that the "freedom of choice" of consumer goods (in any case greatly exaggerated by the celebrants of a "flexible" and "post-Fordist" dispensation) is scarcely the same thing as the freedom of human beings to control their own destinies and to play an active part in shaping their collective life, that is to say, to wrest their collective future away from the blind necessities of history and its determinisms: surrender to the famous "market mechanisms" of the invisible hand is in this sense the abdication of the challenges of human freedom, rather than some admirable exercise of human powers (the whole issue then becoming trivialized by the realization that such an ideal and idealized free market has never existed anywhere in history and is not likely to do so). All of which takes a somewhat different turn when it is rephrased in the theological or metaphysical terms of a Niebuhr-like original sin, or a hybris of the kind Edmund Burke attributed to the Jacobin project: here human nature is itself indicted, along with the perniciousness of the Utopian as such. It is a language which seems to have caught on in the former East, where post-socialist intellectuals have imputed the destructiveness of everything political from Bolshevism to Stalin himself to the evils of a Utopian will to transform society; unfortunately, the decision to stop willing such transformations merely amounts to passing the decision-making power on to someone else (nowadays generally a foreigner). As for the conviction about the sinfulness of human nature, and although it might well seem to be a demonstrable empirical fact that human animals are naturally vicious and violent and that nothing good can come of them, it also might be well to remind ourselves that that is an ideology too (and a peculiarly moralizing and religious one at that). The fact that cooperation and the achievement of a collective ethos are at best fragile achievements, at once subject to the lures of private consumption and greed and the destabilizations of cynical Realpolitik, cannot strip them of the honor of having occasionally existed. Meanwhile, the belated wisdom of a Franc;:ois Furet-like disillusionment expresses itself in the law-and-order ethos of what I am tempted to call neoConfucianism: the "respect" for even the most unprepossessing authority and the preference for the most disreputable state violence over the most humanly comprehensible forms of chaos and revolt. Not only does violence always begin on the right, triggering the infinite chain reaction of counter-violence that makes up so much of recent history; it is important to take into account at least the possibility that the destructive passions of the great right-wing movements, from fascism to nationalism and beyond it, to ethnic and fundamentalist fanaticisms, are essentially substi-

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tutes-not primary desires in themselves, they spring from rage and bitter disappointment at the failures of Utopian aspirations, and from the consequent, and deeply held, conviction that a more genuinely cooperative social order is fundamentally impossible. As substitutes, in other words, they reflect the situation in which, for whatever reason, revolution itself seems to have failed; and this is the moment to turn to that related, but distinct, topic.

III

For the critique of the very concept of revolution is virtually the centerpiece of most recent post-Marxisms (as it already was in Bernstein), and this for theoretical as well as for political reasons. I will assume, perhaps unjustly, that political reasons most often motivate the philosophical debates around this question-those that swirl around the concepts of totality and telos, around notions of the centered and decentered subject, around history and narrative, skepticism and relativism or political "belief" and commitment, around the Nietzschean perpetual present and the possibility of thinking radical alternatives (it being understood that the more visceral and ideological motivations of such philosophical choices do not exclude the necessity of arguing them on a purely philosophical basis as well). I believe that the concept of revolution has two somewhat different implications, both of which are worth preserving, particularly under current circumstances. The first implication has to do with the nature of social change itself, which I will argue to be necessarily systemic; the other implication has to do with the way in which collective decision-making is to be conceived. But this kind of discussion cannot begin to make headway until we disentangle from the conceptual questions the encumberment of representation and image with which they are so often invested. This involves not merely the unwanted "persistence of vision" of stereotypical older pictures of revolutions that took place in the earliest stages of modernization, let alone in the transition out of feudalism itself: which is not to say that the histories of such revolutions, from the great French revolution itself to its English predecessor (or even from the Hussites or the peasant wars, let alone from the Spartacus uprising) all the way to the Chinese and the Cuban revolutions, are without important historical and dialectical lessons, besides offering stirring narratives still more interesting than most countries' history books, let alone their novels. Nor is it only a matter of the obvious, namely that radical social transformation in conditions of more complete modernization (not to speak of postmodernization) will necessarily raise very different problems and generate very different kinds of collective activity. Rather, we need to do without these images because of the ways they constrict the political imagination, and encourage the illicit reasoning that consists in discrediting the concept of revo-

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lution on the grounds that, for example, the postmodern city, or rather the communicational sprawl of the post-city, renders the agency of street mobs inoperable for strategic political and revolutionary intervention. In fact, however, it is the image of the mob itself which is ideological, extending back at last as far as the great revolutionary "days" of the French Revolution, and rehearsed like a nightmare in virtually all the great bourgeois novelists of the subsequent century, from Manzoni to Zola, from Dickens to Dreiser, where the reader can sometimes feel that anxieties about property and about the wellnigh physical violations of intimacy are being exploited and abused for essentially political purposes, in order to show what monstrous things happen when social control is relaxed or weakened. But if this is the case, then it seems particularly important that any serious reflection about the concept of revolution rid itself of such pernicious ideological imagery. In fact, here too we observe what was already noticed above, namely the persistence of political anxieties-better still, the persistence of the motif of power-in such arguments. Even when not stigmatized as such (for instance, in the more philosophical analyses, such as those, most subtly of all, developed by Laclau and Mouffe, and following them, by most so-called post-Marxists), what is always at the bottom of the quarrel about the term is the conception of revolution as violent, as a matter of armed struggle, forceful overthrow, the clash of weapons wielded by people willing to shed blood. This conception explains in turn the appeal of what may be called demotic Trotskyism, that is, the insistence on adding the requirement of "armed struggle" to whatever socialist proviso is at issue: something that would seem both to substitute effect for cause and unnecessarily to raise the ante on salvation. Rather, this proposition needs to be argued the other way around: namely that the other side will resort to force when the system is threatened in genuinely basic or fundamental ways, so that the possibility of violence becomes something like the test of the authenticity of a given "revolutionary" movement seen retroactively, by Hegel's owl of Minerva or Benjamin's angel of History (they are in fact the same being under different disguises). This involves something like the paradoxes of predestination and election in theology: to choose violence is the outward sign and it always comes afterwards, it cannot be reckoned on in advance, as when social democracy cautiously plots a course calculated to offend no one. But if the course arrives at a genuine systemic change, then resistance necessarily occurs, virtually by definition, but not because the planners wanted it that way. So a peculiar politico-economic Heisenberg principle is at work here (as in Weinstein's critique of left-wing American strategies, touched on above): we seem incapable of grasping diachronic change except through our synchronic and systemic lenses; history has always happened already; class realities, only detectable in hindsight, cannot be second-guessed. The attempt to think revolution (or to "refute" it) thus necessarily involves two kinds of issues: that of system and that of class (Marx himself having been

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the theoretician who combined them). The argument about system, namely, that everything in society is ultimately connected to everything else, and that in the long run it is impossible to achieve the most minimal reforms without first changing everything-this argument has most often philosophically been conducted around the much stigmatized notion of totality. Those long-dead philosophical intellectuals for whom the concepts of system and totality were conquests and fundamental weapons against the trivialities of empiricism and positivism and the degradation of the rational into commercial and pragmatic reifications would have been astonished by the latter-day transmogrification of these same quite unphilosophical empirical and anti-systemic positivist attitudes and opinions into heroic forms of resistance to metaphysics and Utopian tyranny; in short, to the State itself. "Waging war on totality" seems somewhat misplaced when it is a question of intellectual systems (such as Marxism) for which the very representation of the social totality is itself fundamentally problematic: the imperative to totalize and to achieve a representation of totality by way of the very dilemma of representation itself-this process seems less plausibly characterized as totalitarian than the specific party structure and mass politics such critics also have in mind. At any rate, it may be enough in the present context to insist on the derivation of the concept of a totality or a system from practical, social, and political experiences that are not so often discussed in this connection. For the notion of a social system is above all suggested by the incompatibility between various kinds of social motives or values, and in particular between a logic of profit and a will to cooperation. The one, indeed, tends to drive the other out; something that makes even the most carefully controlled "mixed economy" a problematic matter. This can also be said the other way around, by stressing the immense moral and collective fervor that has to be mobilized in order to achieve, not merely fundamental social change, but the social construction of new collective forms of production. Such moral and political passion-singularly difficult to sustain under any circumstances, and corresponding to what we have called the ideal of socialism, as opposed to its immediate, local tasksis itself profoundly incompatible with the profit motive and the other values associated with it. These basic incompatibilities are what first and foremost suggest that a system, a totality, or a mode of production, are relatively unified and homogeneous things, that cannot long coexist with systems or modes of a different kind. The concept of revolution is then given with this particular reading of history; entailed by the very concept of system itself, it designates the process, untheorizable in advance, whereby one system (or "mode of production") finally replaces another one. But it is perhaps the very structure of this concept which interferes with its representation, and continues to generate those outmoded images of the revolutionary "seizure of power" we have already complained of, while instituting a new binary opposition or aporia in its turn, namely the antithesis of the

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democratic and the electoral path to power (it should be added that today, no one seems to believe in the latter any more than they do the former). But we have other and different examples of what a revolution might look like that transcends this kind of opposition: Allende's Chile comes to mind, and is time to rescue this historical experiment from the pathos of defeat and the instinctive libidinal anxieties about repression. It is also the moment to take the point of the post-Marxists about the falseness of the conception of instant or moment ("revolutionary" or otherwise), but to complain about their omission of "process" in favor of some Nietzschean infinite stream of heterogeneous time. Left electoral victories are neither hollow social-democratic exercises nor occasions in which power passes hands definitively: rather, they are signals for the gradual unfolding of democratic demands, that is to say, increasingly radical claims on a sympathetic government which must now, in obedience to that development, be radicalized in its turn, unless it sells out to the appeal for order. The revolutionary process in this sense is a new legal dispensation in which repressed popular groups slowly emerge from the silence of their subalternity and dare to speak out-an act which can range, as in Allende's revolutionary Chile, from the proposal of new kinds of laws to the seizure of farm lands; democracy necessarily means that kind of speaking out, which can also be identified as the truest form of the production of new needs (as opposed to consumerism). It is then clearly an immensely disorderly process which threatens to overwhelm control in all directions and generates the kinds of political fears we have already commented on (and of which the fate of Allende's regime is a grisly illustration). But it is a process thoroughly consistent with democracy as such (as opposed to republican institutions), in terms of which all the great revolutions can be rewritten. As questionable as such notions of systematicity may be on the Left today, it is worth observing that they have long since become acquired wisdom on the Right, with its eye on the so-called "transition to capitalism." For the market propagandists have themselves insisted over and over again on the incompatibility of the market system as such with either residual or emergent features of other, different socio-economic systems. It is not necessary to refer to the agonies of "deregulation" in the former socialist countries: one has merely to remember the unremitting pressure the United States has brought-on Canada, to do away with socialized medicine; on Japan and France, to do away with farm supports; on Europe in general, to do away with the "unfair competition" of government welfare structures; and on virtually everyone to do away with the protection of national forms of cultural production-in order to get a vivid picture of the way in which a "purer" market system must necessarily seek to eliminate everything that is other than itself in order to continue to function. Surely such demands, which have in actual practice been pursued by U.S. foreign policy everywhere since the end of World War II, before reaching their paroxysm in the Reagan and "NAFTNGATT" years, persuasively infer

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the very same essentially systemic conception of a society or a mode of production that is normally associated with the ideologically rather different ones of revolution and of totalization. Perhaps this merely suggests the Utopian nature of standard market rhetoric as well: which is no doubt the case if it simply means that the market, as evoked in current conservative and media usage, never existed and never will. On the other hand, the consequences of the systematic are real enough; and I think of that story Joel Chandler Harris tells about a sufferer who met the most amazing difficulties in getting his raging tooth extracted. The barber tried, the blacksmith tried: finally an enterprising dentist of a new type, with all kinds of new equipment, managed to get purchase of the offending molarwhich, however, attached to the jawbone, and then to the backbone, rib cage, pelvis and tibia, finally proved to be hooked onto the big toe; so that by the time they got the tooth out, the whole skeleton came with it and the patient had to be sent home in a pillow-case. Some foreknowledge of the social anatomy might well help us avoid this unhappy fate (which I've actually always felt might serve as the allegory of Reaganite deregulation). The other implication of the concept of revolution can be glossed more rapidly, for it simply takes the revolutionary process as a whole as the condensed figure for the recovery, by the social collective, of the very possibility of praxis, of collective decision-making, self-formation and the choosing of a relationship to nature. Revolution in this sense is the moment in which the collective takes back into its own hands a popular sovereignty (which it may in fact never have enjoyed or exercised in historical reality), in which people recover a capacity to change their own destiny and thereby to win some measure of control over their collective history. But to put it this way is at once to understand why the concept of revolution has fallen on hard times today, for-as has already been observed-there can have been few moments of modern social history in which people in general have felt more powerless: few moments in which the complexity of the social order can have seemed so forbidding and so inaccessible, and in which existent society, at the same time that it is seized in ever swifter change, has seemed endowed with such massive permanence. Indeed, it has been argued that it is precisely this quantum leap in systematicity in the postmodern, or in late capitalism-an intensification marked somehow as scientific and technological, and imputed to cybernetic processes-that has rendered the scale of human agency, whether individual or collective, derisory: it seems more prudent, however, to retain the feature of scale and to bracket the issue of technology itself. For it is also plausible that such confusion and the feelings of helplessness it inspires (along with the conseuent of the paralysis of action, the apathy of those concerned, the cynicism of leaders and followers alike) are themselves a function of the convulsive expansion of the system, which now confronts us with new measures and quantities to which no one has yet adjusted, and with new geographical processes (and

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temporal ones too, insofar as time today is spatial and some new informational simultaneity has to be reckoned back into our categories of the degree and the interval) for which we have not yet grown organs. One of the most striking results of the new scale onto which the system has been projected is the inadequacy of previous categories of agency, and in particular the perception that the notion of social classes is outmoded, or indeed that class in the older (Marxian) sense has ceased to be relevant, if it has not disappeared altogether. This perception thus already conflates the distinct levels of theory and empirical sociology, and requires a more complicated answer, in which the empirical is easier to dispose of (although not for all that particularly gratifying). Globalization, which has spelled the crisis in national production, and thereby in the institutions of a shrinking national work force, can be expected to bring into being international forms of production with the corresponding class relations; yet on a scale so far unimaginable to us, whose forms cannot be deduced in advance, and whose political possibilities cannot yet be predicted, let alone computed. It is necessary to insist both on the inevitability of this new process of global class formation and also on the representational dilemmas with which it presently confronts us: not only is the geological tempo of such class formation imperceptible to organisms condemned to human time (as has been said, we exist simultaneously in both these incommensurable temporal dimensions, which do not communicate with one another); but the schematisms whereby we might begin to map this inaccessible reality (comparable to the problems raised by the passage from a limited or perceptual segment of heavenly space to cosmologies so immense as to escape our mental categories) have also not yet been determined. Indeed, newer categories of representation (or renewed and transformed categories of representation that have fallen into disrepute)-in particular everything clustering around the problem of allegory and implying multidimensional forms of unconscious signification-may serve to document this claim and to testify to the pressure now being exerted on what were formerly common-sense figures for the larger realities. However, at a moment in which international business is in the process of reorganizing itself and developing new relationships across the former national boundaries, and while the technologies of contact, exchange and network-creation have begun to impose their own inevitability, with all kinds of unexpected consequences, it would be surprising indeed if wage workers from different national zones of the world economy were unable to develop new and original ways of reasserting their own interests. Yet to invoke the future in this way (although in this instance it offers no grounds for facile optimism) is also unreasonable, in a situation in which postmodernity also means an imprisonment in the system of a present of time from which the narrative categories of change seem excluded. Meanwhile, the deterioration of the national factory work force has given way to the emergence of masses of unemployed people, who have now come to seem more

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plausible agents of political action (or "subjects of history"), and whose new dynamics are registered in the emergence of the radical new category of marginality as such. Yet all of the inherited wisdom about political organization was acquired on the basis of wage work and the spatial advantages it presents, which are not available in the situation of the unemployed (save in such special cases as involve squatters and bidonvilles or tent cities). The question of class is so often taken to be the central practical objection made to Marxism today that it is worth adding a few more remarks. They would have to begin with the reminder that the alleged incompatibility between a class politics and the priorities of the "new social movements" reflects a very American perspective indeed, insofar as race (and today gender) have always seemed to loom larger than class in the u.s. experience, where sectarianism and the tendential and inevitable fragmentation of larger political movements have also been as American an impulse as religious fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism, if not violence and apple pie. It should also be added that few Marxists in recent times have ever believed that industrial factory workers could come to constitute a numerical majority of the population of advanced and differentiated modern societies: this is why left politics in the twentieth century has consistently taken the form of an alliance politics (no matter how heavy-handed such programs have been, or how fraudulent the regimes that claimed to embody such alliances were in practice). Gramsci's remains the most usable form of such theorization today; which does not exclude a certain general propensity within Marxisms of the modern period towards a workerism whose unspoken presupposition (spelled out by Sartre and Brecht, for example) lies in the feeling that people who work with machines have a different kind of intelligence of the world and a different relationship to action and to praxis than other classes. But all this still amounts to treating "class" as the badge of one group of individuals, who line up to be counted across the room from those other groups of individuals wearing badges that read "race" or "gender" (or perhaps "friends of the earth"). What needs to be argued is the difference in conceptual status between the idea of social class and that of race or gender: and this means something more than the evident fact-often triumphantly produced in evidence against it-that the category of class is a universalizing one and a form of abstraction capable of transcending individuality and particularity in a more successful and also more productive way (insofar as the upshot of that transcendence is envisioned to be the abolition of the category itself). In this sense, class is often supposed to be an "ontological" category like "matter" or "materialism," which implies and perpetuates the error of substance and substantiality (of truth, presence, etc.). In fact, the "truth" of the concept of class (to speak like the Hegelians) lies rather in the operations to which it gives rise: class analysis, like materialist demystification, remains valid and indispensable even in the absence of the possibility of a coherent "philosophy" or ontology of class itself.

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It would however be equally important to show how what is sometimes overs imply called "class consciousness" is as internally conflicted as categories like race and gender: class consciousness turns first and foremost around subalternity, that is around the experience of inferiority. This means that the "lower classes" carry about within their heads unconscious convictions as to the superiority of hegemonic or ruling-class expressions and values, which they equally transgress and repudiate in ritualistic (and socially and politically ineffective) ways. Few countries are as saturated with undisguised class content as the United States" owing to the absence here of any intermediary or residual aristocratic level (whose dynamics can thus, as in Europe, overlay the modern class oppositions and to a certain degree disguise and displace or even defuse those): all points in which the classes come into public contact in the U.S., as in sports, for example, are the space of open and violent class antagonisms, and these equally saturate the other relations of gender, race, and ethnicity, whose content are symbolically invested in class dynamics and express themselves as through a class apparatus when they are not themselves the vehicle for the expression of class dynamics as such. Yet it is very precisely just such internalized binary oppositions (for class relations are binary and tend to reorganize the other collective symbolic relationships such as race or ethnicity into binary forms as well) which ought to render such phenomena privileged spaces for detecting multiple identities and internal differences and differentiations. It should also be noted that everything that can be said in this respect about subalternity holds for hegemonic or ruling class consciousness itself, which bears within itself the fears and anxieties raised by the internalized presence of the underclasses and symbolically acts out what might be called an "incorporation" of those dangers and class hostilities which are built into the very structure of ruling class consciousness as a defensive response to them. Finally, it should be stressed that class investments operate according to a formal rather than a content-oriented dynamic: it is according to a binary system that phenomena become assimilated to the fundamental play of class antagonisms. Thus, to take a now classic example, the electoral struggle between Kennedy and Nixon in the early 1960s was strongly coded according to class: yet paradoxically it was Kennedy, the liberal figure, whom the American masses consciously or unconsciously perceived as upper-class, owing to his wealth and his Harvard education, while Nixon, who clearly suffered the inferiorities and "stigmas" of a petty bourgeois class background, became at once translated into a representative of the lower classes. Yet other oppositions, drawn from all the ranges of social experience, become recoded in much the same way: thus, in the modern period, the opposition between mass culture and high art acquires a very obvious class symbolism in the United States, despite the oppositional and anti-bourgeois stance of "high art" in Europe; while with the arrival of theory and nascent postmodernity, it is theory which comes to be coded as foreign and thereby upper-class, while "true" creative lit-

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erature-including both "creative writing" and commercial television culture-is rewritten as a populist ethos. Class is thus both an ongoing social reality and an active component of the social imaginary, where, with post-Cold War globalization, it can currently be seen to inform our various (mostly unconscious or implicit) maps of the world system. As a dichotomous phenomenon (there are only two fundamental classes in every mode of production), it is able to absorb and refract gender connotations and oppositions (along with racial ones); at the same time it is itself concealed and complexified by the survival of older residual class images and attitudes, aristocratic or (more rarely) peasant components intervening to distort and enrich the picture, so that Europe and Japan can be coded as aristocratic in the face of a plebeian U.S., while the Third World is joined by Eastern Europe as a generally subaltern area (in which the distinction between working class and peasant is blurred by notions like "underdeveloped," which do not articulate the surplus value transferred from Third to First Worlds over the course of history). As soon as the focus changes from a world system to a regional one-Europe or the Middle East, for example-suddenly the class map is rearticulated in new ways, just as it would be even further if the frame were that of a single nation-state with its internal class oppositions. The point to be made is not, however, that all such class mappings are arbitrary and somehow subjective; but that they are inevitable allegorical grids through which we necessarily read the world, and also that they are structural systems in which all the elements or essential components determine each other and must be read off and defined against each other. This was of course most notably the case with the original dichotomous opposition itself, whose historical emergence in capitalism has been shown to involve a constant process whereby a working class becomes aware of itself in the face of business repression, while the ruling class is also forced into an ever greater self-definition and organization by the demands and the threats of a labor movement. This means in effect that each of the opposing classes necessarily carries the other around in its head and is internally torn and conflicted by a foreign body it cannot exorcise. Class categories are therefore not all examples of the "proper," in Derrida's sense, or of the autonomous and pure, the self-sufficient operations of origins defined by so-called class affiliation: nothing is more complexly allegorical than the play of class connotations across the whole width and breadth of the social field, particularly today; and it would be a great mistake for Marxism to abandon this extraordinarily rich and virtually untouched field of analysis on the grounds that class categories were somehow old-fashioned and Stalinist and need to be renounced shamefacedly in advance, before a respectable and streamlined reappearance can be made in the field of intellectual debate in the new world system. But if we can accustom ourselves to thinking of a class as a category (rather than as an empirical property, like a birth certificate or property statement),

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then perhaps it will prove more natural to think of class as always being contingent and embodied, as always necessarily having to realize and specify itself by way of the categories of gender and race. It is this increasing sense of the need to grasp such categories as a triangulation that accounts for the recent fortunes of such terms and concepts as "articulation," concepts which do not supply instant recipes for alliance building, but at least impose a requirement to make a complete circuit on the occasion of any local analysis, and to make sure that none of these categories is omitted, of which it can safely be said that when you forget anyone of them, it does not fail to remember you. But in the United States it is the category of class that is the most likely to be neglected: so that it has celebrated its own kind of "return of the repressed" in the ways in which the various new social movements have all in their different fashions run into trouble on the invisible and subterranean realities of class conflict. Perhaps it is appropriate to conclude this section by observing that class is also that analytic category which makes it most difficult to avoid grasping the social as a systemic entity which can only be changed in a radical and systemic way.

IV

As for communism, what needs to be affirmed is that the recent developments (which spelled the demise of so many of the regimes that bore that name) are due, not to its failure, but to its success, at least as far as modernization is concerned. Left-wing economists are by no means the only ones who have sung the praises of Marxism-Leninism (about which it will have become clear that I here distinguish it sharply from Marxism as such) as a vehicle for modernization: one can even find editors of The Economist who have saluted the one-party state as a useful path towards the rapid industrialization of underdeveloped societies (particularly in Africa). This makes it all the more amusing to hear the day's more reactionary revisionist historians regret the heights of productivity that Russia would more peacefully have been able to reach had the liberals remained in power; let alone to watch them point to the prosperity of Taiwan today as proof of the superiority of Chiang Kai-shek's economics over that of his mainland rivals. The fact is that Stalin modernized the Soviet Union, at a tremendous cost, transforming a peasant society into an industrial state with a literate population and a remarkable scientific superstructure. Stalinism was thus a success and fulfilled its historic mission, socially as well as economically, and it is idle to speculate whether this could have happened in some more normal, peaceful, evolutionary way. For the crucial distinction remains, namely that Soviet communism was a modernization strategy which (unlike Japanese state capitalism, for example) used a variety of socialist methods and institutions. Its use of those institutions, its deployment of socialist rhetoric and values, indeed its very origins in a very different and surely proto-socialist rev-

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olution had the result of developing some aspects of a socialist life-world as a byproduct and also of representing the embodiment of socialist hopes and values to the outside world for an extended period. But one wishes today, particularly where modernism is complete or where it is no longer on the agenda, to insist on the radical differences between socialism, which Marx and Engels expected to develop, at the end of capitalism, out of a regime of high industrial productivity, and the heroic and grisly, thrilling and horrifying saga of the forced modernization of that particular Third World country. At any rate, it is rather the collapse of this system that now needs to be addressed: to be explained precisely in terms of its success (rather than in terms of hidden flaws and weaknesses) and in a way that documents the continuing explanatory powers of Marxian theory in a situation which has often been taken to discredit it. Once again, it will be the prodigious expansion of the capitalist system, the "scaling" upward of its global reach into a new and more intensive kind of international relationality, that provides the most satisfying account of the Soviet Union. It is an account that does not exactly function in terms of the competition between the two "systems," although it must certainly draw attention to the enthusiasm with which the Soviet leaders of the "period of stagnation" sought to attach themselves ever more closely to the emergent new world system, in part in order to borrow heavily and to consume ever more of the West's attractive (and essentially high-tech and communicational or informational) products. Meanwhile, I believe that competition in defense spending, and the tactic whereby the Reagan administration led the Soviet Union on into ever greater military outlays beyond its own means-to which the Soviet collapse is most often attributed-is also to be understood in this fashion as yet another form of typically Western-style consumption, encouraging the emergence of the Soviet state from the shelter of its own system in a misguided (although perfectly comprehensible) attempt at the emulation of products for which it had no economic or systemic need (unlike the Americans, whose postwar prosperity has largely depended on just such state-military spending). Of course, counter-revolutionary strategy has often involved just such long-term systematic threats which transform democratic revolutions into a state of siege, including ever larger surveillance and police activity and the classic development of the Terror, as that can be observed at least as far back as the French Revolution. But the unique timing of this particular effort, at the watershed between modern and postmodern production, determined a kind of cooptation, a transfer of values and habits of consumption, unusually destructive to such revolutionary institutions as still subsisted. This also suggests a significant cultural dimension of the process, to which we will return later on. But systemic interrelationship is a two-way street, and many are the cybernetic images of what you lay yourself open to when you link up to an external network. I myself prefer figures of high pressure: by way of the Debt and devel-

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oping commercial coexistence, the Soviet Union, hitherto isolated in its own specific pressure area as under some ideological and socioeconomic geodesic dome, now began imprudently to open the airlocks without their space suits on, and to allow themselves and their institutions to be subjected to the infinitely more intense pressures characteristic of the world outside. The result can be imagined as comparable to what the sheer blast pressures did to the flimsy structures in the immediate vicinity of the first atomic bomb; or to the grotesque and deforming effects of the enormous weight of water pressure at the bottom of the sea on unprotected organisms evolved for the upper air. These figures are to be understood, less in sheerly physical ways as characterizing the punctual impact of late capitalism on this or that individual form, than rather as systemic vulnerability: the exposure to a wholly different dynamic and as it were a different set of physical and natural laws altogether. Three examples of just such systemic incompatibilities can be found in the phenomenon of the national debt, and in the dominant imperatives of efficiency and productivity. The debt, to be sure, comes in two forms, one of which, seen from the outside, can be witnessed in the catastrophe of the Third World countries; the other, more internal, seems to turn rather on the national budget. The politics of the latter is of course complicated by an Imaginary that solicits the assimilation of governmental priorities to people's individual handling of their own private incomes-a highly psychoanalytic matter whose analogies do not particularly make for rational thinking about the national debt itself, about which Heilbroner has tried to explain that it would be a disaster to "pay it off" and that it is misguided and bad politics to think of the matter in these terms. What seems to be at stake in these arcane discussions is essentially the credit of a given nation-state, that is to say, the way in which other nations assess its economic viabilities. That is obviously a very important consideration when it comes to borrowing on the outside, or securing foreign capital investment; but older values of autarchy (and not only Stalinist versions of those) put a premium on avoiding that kind of financial dependence in the first place. It has been said repeatedly that national autonomy of this kind is no longer possible; it is certainly obvious that it is not possible to retain autonomy if you are eager, on the other side, to be a part of the transnational system as it functions today; and Cuba and North Korea are supposed to demonstrate the unviability of trying to go it alone. If, on the other hand, you imagined that autonomy, or in other words resistance to various binding norms of late-capitalist economic practice, might under certain circumstances be a matter of national pride, then a convenient rhetoric lies to hand in which nationalism is itself denounced as a barbarous collective fantasy and the source of unmitigated violence (at this point, somehow the phenomena of the national and the ethnic suddenly find themselves inextricably identified and conflated). At any rate the loss of national autonomy, whether deliberate or not, has the immediate effect of subjecting the nation-state to external financial regulation, at the

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same time that the Debt does not vanish along with the communist regimes who first began to accumulate it. Efficiency is yet another of those international norms that may not have been particularly relevant for countries operating on other principles; the reproach of inefficiency-archaic factories, ancient cumbersome technology, wasteful production methods-is of course a favorite one with which to beat the (now expired) Soviet donkey, and it has the advantage of implying a much simpler historical lesson than the one elaborated here, namely that the Soviets "lost" because their production was shoddy and unable to stand comparison with our own (and, as a bonus in the form of a secondary ideological conclusion, because socialism is itself fundamentally inefficient). But we have just shown that such comparisons or competitions were far from being relevant as such and in themselves, becoming operative only at the moment in which the Soviets decided to join the world market. (As suggested above, warfare, whether it be Hitler's against Stalin, or the Americans in the Cold War, imposes its own kind of forced competition; the race in defense spending can thus be seen as a way of forcing the Russians to join the world system.) But initially efficiency is not an absolute but a priority which may well sometimes take second place to other, no less rational considerations. Indeed, Sweezy and Magdoff showed years ago, about both the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, that in the construction of socialism, industrial production could also be thought of as a form of collective pedagogy: not merely the reeducation in practice of peasants, whose mentalities are to be modified by the enlarged literacy of the machine itself, but also the political education of factory workers in forms of self-government and autogestion. One can imagine that for a social revolution in course (and which had overcome more urgent problems of sheer hunger and misery) those might sometimes be values that override a conception of efficiency whose essential function is the promotion of comparisons between the level of various kinds of national and international production, and whose relevance is thus ultimately found in the matter of productivity itself. But productivity, as Marx taught long ago in Capital, is itself no timeless absolute against which the individual labor process can be mysteriously evaluated once and for all: it is produced, and very precisely by the unified market itself, which then allows a standard of comparison to come into play between the various firms, ultimately driving out those that are unable to keep pace with the newer methods. It is in this sense that a shoe factory operating in a perfectly satisfactory way in some isolated village and province, whose needs it is there to meet, is suddenly transfixed as a virtually unworkable anachronism when, absorbed by a more unified system, it has to meet the standards of the metropolis. This is the sense in which, on a comparative scale, higher productivity means not only newer machinery, but newer technology, that can compete with the standards set elsewhere: the point is however precisely that productivity is a comparative concept and not an absolute one, and that it only

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makes sense across space, in which different forms of productivity come into contact in the market and can thereby be compared. In such contacts between isolated factories or between whole regions, the boundary of the context is everything, and its opening up can prove disastrous to the more modest but often no less successful operations on the wrong side of the divide. But all this is precisely what happened to the Soviet Union and its client states when they formed the project of plunging into the capitalist world market and of hitching their star to the newly emergent world system of late capitalism as that has itself taken form in the last twenty years. We may also want to take into consideration the possibility that this period of stagnation, in which economic corruption and the moral deterioration of the leadership went hand in hand with the loss of political will or ambition, with cynicism and with a generalized feeling of powerlessness, was in fact not restricted to the Soviet Union of the Brezhnev era, but had its equivalents worldwide. What Hisham Sharabi describes (in his book of the same name) as "neo-patriarchy" in the Arab world, for example, seems strictly comparable, as do of course the more fashionable and Western excesses of the Reagan and Thatcher regimes. It would be wrong to think of this universal stagnation (accompanied by stupefying quantities of loose and unproductive riches) as a cyclical matter by virtue of which the political 1960s were succeeded by a new period of unbridled speculation, itself presumably to be replaced by this or that return of government responsibility and state intervention. Stagnation, at any rate, seems to have coincided with the emergence of the Debt-possibly as its very reason for being-as First World banks began to lend their uninvestable surpluses with abandon to the Second and Third Worlds in the early 1970s; and also with the invention of the word and of the strategy of "deregulation" around 1976. But the more fundamental historical question about such a periodization turns on the issue of modernization itself, and what its status might be under what has now widely come to be known as postmodernity . In the grim and implacably argued work referred to above, Robert Kurz has recently suggested that we link modernization and the modern (or "modernity") together far more inextricably than we have had the habit of doing, and that we draw thereby the ultimate conclusion that it is modernization itselfread: industrialization, the construction of new plants, the setting in place of new productivities-that is over and done with; and that whatever else postmodernity may be, it no longer involves modernization or production in any meaningful sense. Kurz's book asks us to imagine the extraordinary mobility of what have become unparalleled amounts of capital sloshing around the globe, like water in a basin, at speeds that approach simultaneity as their outer limit. Its touchdown points are governed, however, by the prevailing rates of return, themselves geared and attuned to high-tech industry or postindustrial postmodernity: the

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most basic laws of capital-indeed its very definition-excluding investments in those older, purely modern forms of productivity that we associate with the oldfashioned industrial age itself. Not only are their rates of profit far lower than what obtains in high tech, but the velocities of the new international transfers make it much easier for mobile capital to escape these sluggish backwaters of the older factories and to teleport onwards to fancier arrangements. But it was precisely those older forms of modern productivity that underdeveloped countries, (and even those now unwillingly underdeveloped parts of the developed or advanced countries) needed in order to "develop" and to "modernize," to endow themselves with a varied infrastructure that might afford a certain industrial autonomy. International capital will no longer tarry for them, or for any "modernization" in this classical sense. The conjuncture is thus supremely unfavorable, not to say contradictory: for the great majority of Third and former Second World nations, the clock still calls for modernization in an ever more peremptory and urgent fashion; while for capital, moving rapidly from one lowwage situation to the next, only cybernetic technology and postmodern investment opportunities are ultimately attractive. Yet in the new international system, few countries can seal themselves off in order to modernize at their own time and leisure: most have already bought into an international circuit of debt and consumption from which they can no longer extricate themselves. Nor is the new cybernetic technology of any immediate use to such developing countries, for social as well as economic reasons: it creates no new jobs or social wealth, it does not even minimally provide import substitutions, let alone a basic national source of ordinary necessities. As Kurz puts it, "remorselessly the law of profitability must sooner or later reassert itself-a law which specifies that only that production has market value that corresponds to the internationallevel of productivity today" (Kollaps der Modernisierung, 196). This is then the more fundamental meaning of the end of the modern as such: the discovery that modernization is no longer possible for anyone. It is the only possible meaning that postmodernity can have, which is merely trivialized if it is understood to designate nothing more than changes in fashion and in dominant ideas and values. But it was this arid wind of postmodernity that caught the Soviets unawares when they timidly ventured out of "socialism in one country." Such stories can always be told another way: indeed, it is becoming imperative always to do so, since only a variety of possible narratives can begin to model the "absent cause" that underlies them all and that can never be expressed as such. (Nietzschean relativism and fictionality is thus most productively used as a mode of triangulation or of the deployment of parallaxes, rather than as some idle flight from "linear history" or "old-fashioned" notions of causality that are themselves in reality mere narrative forms). So an alternative narrative may be sketched in here which underscores the essentially cultural failures of communism: for its propensities to consume, its

Actually Existing Marxism • 49 fascination with Western products of all kinds, but above all with the specific products of the postmodern age (informational technology in the most general sense)-these fatal weaknesses, that impelled communism towards the great market of the Western world system, are fundamentally signs of cultural weakness, symptoms of the failure of any specifically socialist collective culture to emerge; or at least to consolidate a mode of daily living and a practice of subjectivity that could both keep pace with Western fashions in these matters and constitute a viable (and systemic) alternative. The prestige of Islam today indeed stems in no small measure from its unique claim to offer such an alternative to Western culture. But the argument is, to be sure, circular, since this use of culture is so broad as to envelop the hitherto "merely" economic within itself: not only is "entertainment" a basic u.s. industry, but shopping and consumption are fundamental American cultural activities (along with religion). So this chicken is in reality its own egg: and it does not matter much whether the Eastern European "cultural fever" caused them to take the plunge into the Western market or merely served as the symptom that they were in the process of doing so. Are we then, finally, to consider the disappearance of the Soviet Union a good thing? There are radicals who believe, plausibly enough, that the disappearance of communism will make left politics in the U.S. more viable, if only by cleansing it of the taint of the foreign and the imported, as well as of "tyranny." Such movements for national liberation as still exist in the outside world, meanwhile, must bitterly regret the evaporation of that material aid and support with which (to give them their due) the Soviets were often so generous. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, not to speak of our own selfknowledge and moral welfare, it does not seem particularly desirable for Yankee hypocrisy and self-righteousness triumphantly to remain alone in the field. We have never had much understanding of genuine cultural difference, particularly as we do not perceive our kind of capitalism and our kind of electoral system to be cultural (rather than simply the most obvious aim and end of all history). Once upon a time, and for whatever reasons of their own, the sheer existence of the Soviets constituted something of a brake on these tendencies, and often allowed this or that collectivity to assert its national identity and independence and to proceed to the rudimentary social revolution still desperately necessary in every country of the globe today. The Iraq war is there to show how we behave when such restraints no longer obtain: nor do Europe or Japan seem likely to be able to assume this role of moral counterweight, since there is a very real question as to whether they still constitute autonomous cultures in their own right or whether Americanization has not eaten away at the very substance of what once seemed primary traditions, albeit in more subtle and imperceptible ways than its dissolution of putatively socialist traditions in the European East.

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v This now leads us into our final topic (which we have, of course, in reality been discussing all along), namely the nature of late capitalism or the world system today and the place of Marxism within it. It is a question that probably needs to be enlarged by another, more preliminary one-namely, which Marxism?since few intellectual movements have known quite so many internal schisms. That between a theoretical or highly intellectualized Marxism and a practical or even vulgar, demotic Marxism, for example, is not exactly the same as the opposition between so-called Western Marxism and the much-stigmatized Soviet kind, nor even between Hegel and Marx, or historical materialism and dialectical materialism-but there is certainly some affinity between all these unholy dualisms, whose adherents can often be observed in passionate conflict. Every hyperintellectual or philosophical Marxism ought to carry a vulgar one inside it, Brecht once said: while the very founder of that same MarxismLeninism that is for most people the purest form of the vulgar doctrine par excellence was once heard to exclaim, "All Marxists should, ex officio, constitute a 'societe des amis materialistes de la dialectique hegelienne'!" This polarity no doubt betrays the unresolvable slippage, in Marxism as elsewhere, between subject and object, between the irreconcilable starting points of consciousness and of the world. Vulgar Marxism has clearly fared the less well of the two: since its "grand narrative" of the modes of production, and of the transition to socialism, falls under the two-fold verdict leveled, first on narratives as such, and then on socialism in particular. This is not only to point to the void in political praxis left by the crisis of the communist parties and the abdication of the socialist ones; but also to designate the very empty place of any vision of History which might inform local and national praxis at the same time that it offers a motivation for theory and analysis in the first place. Into that void, of course, the various Manichaeanisms and their apocalypses have flowed; nor is it improbable that out of their raw materials, some new vision of history may gradually be refashioned: to say that it will necessarily be Marxian in the most general sense is merely to recognize the fact that of all the current competing ideologies only Marxism stubbornly retains its constitutive relationship with History as such, that is to say, with a redemptive vision of the future-without which it must necessarily falter as a political project, but also as a field of scientific research. The more philosophical, or if you take the worst-case scenario, more academic Marxism has never been more flourishing, as witness the extraordinary richness of contemporary Marxian economics and historiography: somewhat paralyzed, it is true, by their current reluctance to end their narratives on a triumphalist note, with singing futures. If the first, practical Marxism, of labor unions and political parties, was a Marxism of the base, one is tempted to

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identify this one with the superstructure, provided it is understood, first, that the very opposition stems from "vulgar" or demotic Marxism rather than from its more sophisticated counterpart, and second, that at the heart of all such current theoretical economic and historiographic analyses of capitalism that have just been referred to there dwells a sometimes unspoken premise that the very relationship of superstructure and base has itself been profoundly and structurally modified in late capitalism. This proposes a more paradoxical interrelationship of base and superstructure than had been conceptualized earlier, and thereby produces a demand for more complex theoretical solutions and models; indeed, it implies a whole new theoretical agenda for Marxism about which only a few basic points can be made here. For one thing, these developments-the structural modifications of late capitalism-explain something of a shift in "theoretical Marxism" from philosophy to culture. The philosophical themes that predominated in so-called Western Marxism remain significant ones; above all, the theorization of totality, always correctly perceived by post- and anti-Marxists to be an indispensable feature of the Marxist project-practical as well as theoretical-insofar as it must necessarily grasp capitalism as a system and must thereby insist on the systemic interrelationships of contemporary reality. Of the competing world-views, presumably only ecology demands totalizing thought in the same way; and we have tried to suggest above that its agenda-as immediate and urgent as it is-necessarily presupposes the socialist one. But even the vulgar repudiation of totalization in social and cultural termsit means "totalitarianism," or the primacy of the intellectual over the people, or a single political party in which all differences are suppressed, or male universalism over the various localisms, or class politics over gender and race, etc., etc.-betrays a weakening of conceptual thought and its supersession by various kinds of knee-jerk doxa that are essentially cultural in origin. Meanwhile some of the other great polemic spaces of the preceding period-structural causality, ideology, the waning of the negative, the relationship to psychoanalysis, and the like-can today better be appreciated as essentially cultural problems. Marxism traditionally made a place for these issues, but it can in hindsight be seen to be a relatively restricted and specialized place, which can perhaps best be initially identified as so-called reification theory, or the analysis of commodification and commodity fetishism. What needs to be suggested in conclusion, therefore, is that this hitherto minor preoccupation will in the immediate future, in the force-field of late capitalism, become the primary focus of theoretical Marxism as such. It is perhaps worthwhile to consider the relationship of commodity theory to practical politics, and in particular the advantages of the Marxian analysis of late capitalism over its liberal and conservative rivals. For the critique of commodification is surely the central issue in any examination of what is original about late capitalism and also in any analysis of the political and social issues

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that seem most hotly debated in it. What then becomes clear is that most political critiques of consumption in late capitalism-which pass insensibly over into a critique of American society as a whole-tend fatally to mobilize an ethical or a moralizing rhetoric and make judgments which are inseparable from such stances. But surely it is a rhetoric which is singularly ill-suited to the kind of society this has become, a society in which religion has been trivialized into an ethnic badge or a hobby of small subgroups, while moralism is at best a harmless generational tic and at worst a matter of ressentiment and historical bitterness; as for great prophecy, were such a thing still conceivable, it could only take the form, today, of crank oratory or mental aberration. (Indeed, the return of ethics as a philosophical subdiscipline and its subsequent colonization of political philosophy is one of the most regressive features and symptoms of the ideological climate of postmodernity.) It seems appropriate, therefore, to exclude moralizing positions on consumption from the outset, for practical-political as well as philosophical reasons. Such ethical mobilizations as have been successful in the u.S. in recent years have taken xenophobic or racist forms and have been accompanied by other reflexes that only too obviously betray the deeper fears and anxieties of the white majority. Only in historically oppositional subgroups, such as the black community, has righteous moral indignation transmitted the great political message of a call for universal justice (for values can only be grounded in the "social equivalent" of lived collectivities). What remains of those ethico-political "grand narratives" on the secular or liberal left is as shrunken as the "political correctness" as which the majority caricatures it. But religion itself today is effective only when (following its etymology) it can express and coordinate a group experience that under present circumstances necessarily risks becoming parochial and exclusionary or sectarian, rather than universal. There is a second version of the moralizing or religious critique of consumer society whose replication of the latter's philosophical flaws and political weaknesses may well be less evident: this is what may be called variously the psychological or the culturalist critique. In this form a steady stream of books and articles on "American life" issue forth which, energetically essentializing their subject matter, are intellectually incapable of grappling with consumerism as a socioeconomic process or of evaluating it as an ideological practice. Durkheim's principle still articulates the fundamental philosophical objection to such thinking, namely that whenever we confront a psychological explanation for a social fact, we may be sure that it is wrong. It is axiomatic that social facts are of a different order of realities than the individual data of psychological or existential experience (and we have already observed Marxism to multiply such differentiations on a far greater scale, in its systematic distinction of the economic from the political, and of both from the social and the psychic, all of which are governed by their own semi-autonomous laws and evolve at distinct rates of speed on very different planes from each other). At any rate, to deploy

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the categories of individual or existential experience for the understanding of social phenomena-whether such categories are put to moralizing or psychologizing uses-is to make a fundamental "category mistake" whereby the collective is anthropomorphized and the social allegorized in individual terms. To characterize the Marxian account of consumerism and commodity fetishism in contrast to this anthropomorphic one as a "structural" explanation may not do justice to the implications of dialectical explanations as such, but it at least serves to emphasize the way in which consumption is here grasped as an objective and impersonal process, one structurally indispensable to capitalism itself, and which cannot simply be diminished, let alone omitted, on whatever moral or cosmetic grounds. Such an account would in effect reunite the French and German traditions, and incorporate the work of the Frankfurt School on reification and commodity fetishism into a postAlthusserian perspective which no longer seeks to bracket such seemingly existential and experiential materials, which are however objects just as real, just as objective and historical, as the various disciplinary and institutional levels to which Althusser tended to oppose them. The advantage, today, in beginning with the functional role commodity fetishism plays in late capitalism as a system lies not only in the way in which it allows us to distinguish this description of postmodernity from the other, mainly culturalist and moralizing, versions; but also on the historic originality it attributes to this kind of society as such. There is certainly an ethical dimension to this analysis, but it takes the complex and dialectical form of the evocation of capitalism in general in the Manifesto, where the latter's simultaneously destructive and progressive features are celebrated, and its simultaneous capacity for liberation as well as for wholesale violence is underscored. Only a dialectical view can do justice to this fundamental ambiguity or ambivalence, which is far from being mere indeterminacy, and which can be seen to recapitulate itself in the positions on postmodernism and postmodernity today, where it seems simplistic either to welcome the new social pluralism of the postmodern or to regret its apolitical one-dimensionality in any univocal way. Thus, the fundamental ambivalence of capital has clearly not been modified by its transformation into this third or postmodern stage; and it has seemed to me that only the Marxian dialectic remained capable of thinking the system adequately, without ideological oversimplifications. The challenge remains to avoid that ethical binary, which is the root form of all ideology: to find a position which neither recapitulates the puritanisms and moralizing denunciations of certain older Marxisms and radical isms (and not only of them) nor surrenders to the mindless euphorias of a market rhetoric reinforced by high-technological enthusiasms; in short, to try to think a beyond of late capitalism which does not imply a regression to earlier, simpler stages of social development but which posits a future already latent in this present, as Marx did for the capitalism of his day.

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Globalization and information technology are indeed the principal novelties of the new "postmodern" stage of capitalism and it is these developments to which Marxism will wish to attach its intellectual and political commitments. It is only from the perspective of the world system as such that reification theory, with its essentially cultural perspective, can be grasped as being at one with the crisis theory of the economists, and the new and permanent structural unemployment understood as an integral part of the totality in which financial speculation and the mass-cultural postmodernities are also inseparable constituents. It is only from such a perspective that new forms of international political praxis can be developed, which promise to grapple with the loss of national autonomy implicit in the new world system and to find ways of drawing strength from the enfeeblement of the national labor movements as well as the rapidity of capital transfers. Nor should the transnational organization of radical intellectuals be omitted here, for its possibilities illustrate the ways in which the new communications systems can be used positively by the left, fully as much as by the business power structure. All of which suggests that the age demands a politics of ambivalence or ambiquity (assuming the word dialectical is still unfashionable): the emphasis on a great collective project whose focus must be on structural impossibilities, the commitment to a globalization for which the loss of autarchy is a catastrophe, the necessity of a cultural focus to be primarily economic and of economic research to grasp the essentially cultural nature of late capitalism, the mass democratization of the world market by world information technology on the very eve of mass starvation and the permanent downsizing of industrial production as such-these are only some of the paradoxical contradictions and contradictory paradoxes which a "late" or postmodern Marxism must confront and embrace as its destiny. This will be surprising only for those who thought Marxism was "dead," or imagined it somehow merely to "survive" in vestigial form, as though bereft of the context and the ecosystem in which it once flourished, however minimally. But it seems paradoxical to celebrate the death of Marxism in the same breath with which you greet the ultimate triumph of capitalism. For Marxism is the very science of capitalism; its epistemological vocation lies in its unmatched capacity to describe capitalism's historical originality, whose fundamental structural contradictions endow it with its political and its prophetic vocation, which can scarcely be distinguished from the analytic ones. This is why, whatever its other vicissitudes, a postmodern capitalism necessarily calls a postmodern Marxism into existence over against itself.

2 Marx After Marxism History, Subalternity, and Difference Dipesh Chakrabarty

MARXISM AND DIFFERENCE IN THE LEFT CIRCLES of the Anglo-American academies, marxism no longer commands the prestige it did in the 1970s. 1 Its place has been taken by varieties of post-structuralism, post-modernism, and post-colonialism. This has understandably produced a sense of a "crisis" among some marxists and spawned a body of literature aimed at defending the accepted tenets of marxism. The authors of this genre accuse other marxists of having sold out to the lures of post-modernism. 2 This article, from a historian who still takes Marx seriously, is born of this same situation but contains a somewhat different response to it. My response does not pretend to be universal in scope, nor does it seek refuge in any denunciation of "Western" academic fashions. For to be a marxist is to work within European traditions of thought anyway. There cannot be, at least for a non-western marxist, any indigenist argument for ignoring theoretical movements in the West. I assume that whether or not one agrees with the likes of Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, and others, one needs to engage with their writings which have drawn some serious question marks across ideas like "emancipation," "universal history/subject," etc., that never looked problematic within the marxist canon. But I also think that this engagement has to issue from our particular positions. In my case, this is one of an academic intellectual who lives and works in Australia-and is therefore subject to the currents of global and local positioning that this creates-but who nevertheless also thinks out of an imaginary base in India (I say this particularly in the context of my involvement the Indian/transnational project Subaltern Studies). My

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remarks on rethinking the current problems of marxist history-writing should be situated in that context. Subaltern Studies began as an argument within Indian marxism, in particular against the teleologies that colonialist and nationalist-marxist narratives had promoted in the 1970s in the field of Indian history. Initially, we wanted to oppose the methodological elitism of both varieties, but our aim was also to produce "better" marxist histories. It soon became clear, however, as our research progressed, that a critique of this nature could hardly afford to ignore the problem of universalismlEurocentrism that was inherent in marxist (or for that matter liberal) thought itself. This realization made us receptive to the critiques of marxist historicism-in particular to the message advocating an attitude of "incredulity toward grand narratives"-that French post-structuralist thinkers increasingly made popular in the English-language academic world in the 1980s. But there always remained important and crucial differences between these thinkers and us. Unlike in the Paris of the post-structuralists, there was never any question in Delhi, Calcutta, or Madras of a wholesale rejection of Marx's thought. Foucault's scathing remark in The Order of Things that "Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought as a fish in water, that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else," may have its point but it never resonated with us with anything approaching the energy that anti-marxism displays in the writings of some post-modernists. This was so not because we believed in any Habermasian project of retrieving Enlightenment reason from the clutches of an all-consuming instrumental rationality. Our attachment to and affection for Marx's thoughts have different roots. They go back to the question of European imperialism from which the problem of Indian modernity cannot be separated. (The question of colonial modernity, or I might say the question of colonialism itself, remains an absent problem in much post-structuralistlpostmodern writing). However, for a modern Indian intellectual, that is, for someone who engages in serious commerce with the thought-products of the European Enlightenment and with their inheritances and legacies but for someone who is also aware, from the cultural practices of Indian society, of there always being other possibilities of "worlding" that now exist in uneven and often subordinate relationship to "Western metaphysics" (forgive this summary expression), for such an intellectual it is difficult to trash Marx's thought quite in the manner of a Foucault. Again, this is not because it is difficult to sympathize with the intellectual criticisms of historicism. My point will in fact be to argue here that these criticisms have to be made central to our reading of Marx. Yet my difficulty with wholly rejecting Marx stems from my belief that critical narratives of imperialism are constitutive of our collective origin-myths. The story of becoming an "Indian" academic-intellectual and having to (because there is no other realistic option!) deal in and with thoughts that never fail to remind you of their European origins, does not make sense with-

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out there being a concomitant narrative locating the emergence of such an intellectual class in the history of capitalist/European imperialism. To say this is not to claim the privileges of the "victim." Imperialism enables as much as it victimizes. Without English imperialism in India and a certain training in Anglo-Euro habits of thought, there would not have been any Subaltern Studies. The story of "capital" and that of the emergence of the market-society in Europe-undeniably a historicist narrative in the most popular recensionshave a central place in our collective self-fashioning. It follows then that Marx's critique of capital and commodity will be indispensable for any critical understanding we might want to develop of ourselves. How can a critique of modernity in India ignore the history of commodification in that society? But, at the same time, this relationship to Marx cannot any longer be the straightforward one that the Indian Communist parties once encouraged, where the scripting of our histories on the lines of some already-told European drama posed no intellectual problems for self-understanding. As deconstructive political philosophy increasingly ponders the intractable problem of genuinely "non-violative" relationship between the Self ("the West") and its Other, and turns to questions of difference and ethics-questions made urgent by the current globalization of capital, information and technology-the task for students of Marx in my part of the world does not seem to be one of improving "marxism" in order to make it impregnable against further assault from the post-modernists. Much in Marx is truly nineteenth-century, gender-blind, and obviously Eurocentric. A post-colonial reading of Marx, it seems to me, would have to ask if and how, and which of, his categories could be made to speak to what we have learned from the philosophers of "difference" about "responsibility" to the plurality of the world. The age of multinational capital devolves on us this responsibility to think "difference" not simply as a theoretical question but as a tool for producing practical possibilities for action. The talk of "difference" often elicits hostile response from marxists. There appear to be a couple of issues at stake. There is, first of all, the long-ingrained habit of thinking the world through the common, and seemingly universal and solidarity-producing, language of marxist prose. Secular history itself is a master-code implicit in modern political thought. Historians are comfortable with the talk of difference so long as the talk does not threaten the very idea of history; that is, the code itself. This produces a second-order problem to which there is no quick and readymade solution and which therefore looks to many like an intellectual dead-end. How would conversation proceed between two historians if "differences" could not be contained within the sameness of the very code (i.e., History) that made the conversation possible in the first place? One may legitimately ask: How can one write/think/talk the non-West in academia without in some sense making it the object of an anthropological exercise? Most historians would prefer to stop at this point and simply get on

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with the job. Progressive historians would perhaps even endorse the strategy of "anthropologizing": it is part and parcel, they would in effect argue, of the struggle to make the world more democratic. After all, what material benefits can the subaltern classes gain from imaginations in which gods, spirits, humans, and animals cohabit the same world? Pointing out that a secular and modern historical consciousness is itself part of the problem of the "colonization of the mind" for many "traditions," such as those of the "Hindus"-I do not intend to make a universal claim and have put the word Hindu in quotes to indicate its socially constructed and contingent nature-is often of no help to these historians. Yet as an Indian historian, this is where I think we confront an almost insoluble problem in writing subaltern history. The problem is also of some critical urgency in India. For most Hindus, if not for most Indians, gods, spirits, and the so-called supernatural have a certain "reality." They are as real as "ideology" is-that is to say, after ZiZek (1990), they are embedded in practices. The secular calendar is only one of the many time-worlds we travel. The bringing together of these different time-worlds in the construction of a modern public life in India has always had something to do with the major crises modern India has had to endure, the most recent one being the current upsurge of a fascistic Hindu movement that has already caused enormous sufferings to the Muslims. The usual vocabulary of political science in India, which discusses these problems in terms of European categories of the secular and the sacred thus making them into a question recycled from European history of "religion" in public life, is pathetically inadequate in its explanatory capacity. The word "religion," everybody agrees, captures nothing of the spirit of all the heterodox Hindu practices it is meant to translate. For however cynical one may be in one's analysis of the "reasons" why the Hindu political parties may want to use the "Hindu" card, one still has to ask questions about the many different meanings that divine figures (such as the god-king Rama) assume in our negotiations of modern institutions such as parliamentary democracy. But this is where I return to the dilemma I posed in the previous paragraph: Do we, in the already universal language of marxist prose, simply anthropologize these meanings, treat them as imaginary or not-real constructs from which our observing positions are complete separate, or do we, in developing a marxist prose suited to our struggles (to the struggles that arise for modern Indian intellectuals from being situated in a modernity of colonial origins) attempt to inscribe horizons of radical otherness into the visions of Marx's critique of capital? I cannot pretend to escape these problems any more than other marxists can, nor is it my aim here to do so. The very limited question I intend to deal with here is: Do Marx's categories allow us to trace the marks of that which must of necessity remain unenclosed by these categories themselves? In other words, are there ways of engaging with the problem of "universality" of capital that

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do not commit us to a bloodless liberal pluralism that only subsumes all difference(s) within the Same? Looking back at some work I did on (Indian) "working-class" history a few years ago, I only seem to have half-thought the problem. I documented a history whose narrative(s) produced several points of friction with the teleologies of "capital." In my study of the jute-mill workers of colonial Bengal I tried to show how the production-relations in these mills were structured from the inside, as it were, by a whole series of relations that could only be considered "pre-capitalist." The coming of "capital" and "commodity" did not appear to lead to the politics of equal rights that Marx saw as internal to these relations. I refer here in particular to the critical distinction Marx draws between "real" and "abstract" labor in explaining the production and form of the commodity. This is how I then read the distinction (with enormous debt to Michel Henry and I. I. Rubin); Marx places the question of subjectivity right at the heart of his category "capital" when he posits the conflict between "real labour" and "abstract labour" as one of its central contradictions. "Real labour" refers to the labour power of the actual individual, labour power "as it exists in the personality of the labourer"-that is, as it exists in the "immediate exclusive individuality" of the individual. Just as personalities differ, similarly the labour power of one individual is different from that of another. "Real labour" refers to the essential heterogeneity of individual capacities. "Abstract" or general labor, on the other hand, refers to the idea of uniform, homogeneous labor that capitalism imposes on this heterogeneity, the notion of a general labor that underlies "exchange value." It is what makes labor measurable and makes possible the generalized exchange of commodities. It expresses itself ... in capitalist discipline, which has the sole objective of making every individual's concrete labor-by nature heterogeneous-"uniform and homogeneous" through supervision and the technology employed in labour process .... . Politically, ... the concept of "abstract labour" is an extension of the bourgeois notion of the "equal rights" of "abstract individuals," whose political life is reflected in the ideals and practice of "citizenship." The politics of "equal rights" is thus precisely the "politics" one can read into the category "capital. ,,3 It now seems to me that Marx's category of "commodity" has a certain built-in openness to "difference" that I did not fully exploit in my exposition. My reading of the term "pre-capital" remained, in spite of my efforts, hopelessly historicist, and my narrative never quite escaped the (false) question, "Why did the Indian working class fail to sustain a long-term sense of class consciousness?," the meta-problem of "failure" itself arising from the wellknown marxist tradition of positing the working class as a transcultural,

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world-historical subject. Besides, it is also clear from the above quote that my reading took the ideas of the "individual" and "personality" as unproblematically given, and read the word "real" (in "real labor") to mean something primordially natural (and therefore not social). But my larger failure lay in my inability to see that if one read the "real" as socially/culturally produced-and not as a Rousseauvian "natural," as something that refers simply to the naturally different endowments of different, and ahistorical, individuals-other possibilities open up; among them the one of writing "difference" back into Marx. For the "real" then, in this reading, would refer to different kinds of "social" and hence to different orders of temporality. It should in principle even allow for the possibility of these temporal horizons being mutually incommensurable. The transition from "real" to "abstract" is thus also a question of transition/translation from many and possibly incommensurable temporalities to the homogeneous time of abstract labor, the transition from "non-history" to "history." The category of "real" labor, therefore, has the capacity to refer to that which cannot not be enclosed by the sign, commodity, even though it, the unenclosed, constantly inheres in the latter; that is, in the sign itself. The gap between "real" and "abstract" labor and the force constantly needed to close it is what introduces the movement of "difference" into the very constitution of the commodity and thereby eternally defers its achievement of its true/ideal character. The sign "commodity," as Marx explains, will always carry as parts of its internal structure certain universal emancipatory narratives. If one overlooked the tension Marx situated at the heart of this category, these narratives could indeed produce the standard teleologies one normally encounters in marxist historicism: that of citizenship, the juridical subject of Enlightenment thought, the subject of political theory of rights, etc. I do not mean to deny the practical utility of these narratives in modern political structures. However, the more interesting problem for the Marxist historian, it seems to me, is the problem of temporality that the category "commodity," constituted through the tension and possible non-commensurability between "real" and "abstract" labor, invites us to think. If "real" labor, as we have said, belongs to a world of heterogeneity whose various temporalities cannot be enclosed in the sign History-Michael Taussig'S work on Bolivian tin miners clearly shows that they are not even all "secular" (i.e., bereft of gods and spirits}-then it can find a place in a historical narrative of capitalist transition (or commodity production) only as a Derridean trace of something that cannot be enclosed, an element that constantly challenges from within capital's and commodity'sand, by implication, History's-claims to unity and universality. The prefix "pre" in "pre-capital," it could be said similarly, is not a reference to what is simply chronologically prior on an ordinal, homogeneous scale of time. "Pre-capitalist" is a hyphenated identity, it speaks of a particular relationship to capital marked by the tension of difference in the horizons of time.

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The "pre-capitalist" can only exist within the temporal horizon of capital and is yet something that disrupts the continuity of this time by suggesting another time that is not on the same, secular, homogeneous calendar (which is why what is pre-capital is not chronologically prior to capital-that it to say, one cannot assign it to a point on the same continuous time-line). This is another time which, theoretically, could be entirely immeasurable in terms of the units of the godless, spiritless time of what we call "history" and which is already assumed in the secular concepts of "capital" and "abstract labor." Subaltern histories, thus conceived in relationship to the question of difference, will have a split running through them. One the one hand, they are "histories" in that they are constructed within the master-code of secular History and use the accepted academic codes of history-writing (and thereby perforce anthropologize all other forms of memory). On the other hand, they cannot ever afford to grant this master-code its claim of being a mode of thought that comes to all human beings naturally, or even to be treated as something that exists out there in nature itself (remember the tell-tale title of]. B. S. Haldane's book, Everything Has A History?). Subaltern histories are therefore constructed within a particular kind of historicized memory, one that remembers History itself as a violation, an imperious code that accompanied the civilizing process that the European Enlightenment inaugurated in the eighteenth century as a world-historical task. It is not enough, however, to historicize History, the discipline, for that only uncritically perpetuates the temporal code which enables us to historicize. The point is to ask how this imperious, seemingly all-embracing code might be deployed or thought so that we have at least a glimpse of its own finitude, a vision of what might constitute an "outside" to it. To hold history, the discipline, and other forms of memory together so that they can help in the interrogation of each other, to work out the ways these immiscible forms of recalling the past get juxtaposed in our negotiations of modern institutions, to question the narrative strategies in academic history which allow its secular temporality the appearance of successfully assimilating to itself memories which are not, strictly speaking, assimilable: these are the tasks that subaltern histories are suited to accomplish in a country such as India. For to talk about the violent jolt that the imagination has to suffer in order to be transported from a temporality co-habited by gods and living beings to one from which the gods are banished is not to express an incurable nostalgia for a long-lost world. Even for the members of the Indian upper classes, this experience of travelling across temporalities can in no way be described as merely historical. Of course, the empirical historian who writes these histories is not a peasant or a tribal person (and often not even a woman). S/he produces History, as distinct from other forms of memory, precisely because s/he has been transposed and inserted-in my case, by England's work in India-into the global narratives of citizenship and socialism. S/he writes history, that is, only after his own

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labor has entered the process of being made abstract in the world-market for ideational commodities. The subaltern, then, is not the empirical peasant or tribal in any straightforward sense that a populist programme of history-writing may want to imagine and is thus necessarily mediated by problems of representation. In terms of the analysis that I have been trying to develop here, one might say that subaltern is what fractures from within the signs that tell of the insertion of the historian (as a speaking subject) into the global narratives of capital. It is what gathers itself under "real" labor in Marx's critique of capital, the figure of difference, that governmentality-in Foucault's sense of the term4-all over the world has to subjugate and civilize. There are implications that follow: subaltern histories written with an eye to difference cannot constitute yet another attempt-in the long and universalistic tradition of "socialist" histories-to help erect the subaltern as the subject of modern democracies; that is, to expand the history of the modern in such a way as to make it more representative of society as a whole. This is a laudable objective on its own terms and has undoubted global relevance. But though the aim of achieving these ends will legitimately fuel many immediate political struggles, thought does not have to stop at political democracy or the concept of the egalitarian distribution of wealth. For fundamentally, this thought is insensitive to philosophical questions of difference and can acknowledge difference only as a practical problem. Subaltern histories will engage philosophically with questions of difference which are elided in the dominant traditions of marxism. At the same time, however, just as "real" labor cannot be thought outside of the problematic of "abstract" labor, subaltern history canot be thought outside of the global narrative of capital (including the narrative of transition to capitalism), though it is not grounded in this narrative. Stories about how this or that group in Asia, Africa, or Latin America resisted the "penetration" of capitalism do not constitute "subaltern" history, for these narratives are pre-theoretical in that they are predicated on the imagination of a space which is external to capital-the chronologically "before" of capital-but a "before" which is at the same time assimilable to the continuous, secular time-line within which both the "before" and the "after" of "capitalist production" can unfold. The "outside" I am thinking of is a theoretical category. I think of it as something attached to the category "capital" itself, something that straddles a border-land of temporality, something that conforms to the temporal code within which "capital" comes into being while violating it at the same time, something we are able to see only because we can think/theorize capital, but something that also always reminds us that other temporalities, other forms of worlding, co-exist and are possible. In this sense, subaltern histories do not refer to a resistance prior and exterior to the narrative-space created by capital. Subaltern Studies, as I think of it, can only situate itself theoretically at the juncture where we give up neither Marx nor "difference," for, as I have said, the resistance it speaks of is something that can happen only within the time-

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horizon of capital while disrupting the unity of that time. Unconcealing the tension between "real" and "abstract" labor ensures that capitaVcommodity has heterogeneities and incommensurabilities inscribed in its core. Or, to put it differently, the practice of subaltern history would aim to take history, the code, to its limits in order to make its unworking visible.

II

MARXISM, HISTORICAL TIME, AND OTHER TEMPORALITIES

Some readers of the preceding section have suggested that I elaborate with a few examples of some of my points about secular-historical and other temporalities and the idea of their "incommensurability." I will do it with the aid of both an everyday Australian example and an historical example from my own research. First, a point about how a conception of historical time, which is inherently elitist, is naturalized in the everyday speech of the middle classes. Consider the following statement that I noticed in an article by my colleague Simon During in the Weekend Extra of the Melbourne daily Age: " ... thinking about movies like Of Mice and Men and The Last of the Mohicans allow us to see more clearly where contemporary culture is going.,,5 The source for the statement actually does not matter, for the article in question is not the target of my comments. My remarks pertain to a certain habit of thought that the statement illustrates. What I want to discuss is the imagination of time that is built into this use of the word "contemporary." Clearly, the word speaks a double gesture, and an implicit acceptance of this gesture between the author and the reader is the condition that enables the sentence to communicate its point. The gesture is double because it is at the same time a gesture of both inclusion and exclusion. Obviously, "contemporary" refers to all that belong to a "culture" at a particular point on the (secular) calendar that the author and the intended reader of this statement inhabit. Yet, surely, it is not being claimed that every element in the culture is moving towards the destination that the author has identified in the films mentioned. What about, for instance, the parents of someone like myself, were they to be in Australia now permanently under the family reunion program? I cannot imagine them as having anything much to do with The Last of the Mohicans even though they would be as much a part of the calendrical "now" as anybody else. Now if we do not assume that their culture was "static" in any way, that they were also going somewhere-though obviously not where The Last of the Mohicans takes us-then obviously they are not included in the "place" that the statement sees as the next stoppingpoint of "contemporary culture." This is the gesture of exclusion that is an inherent part of the word "contemporary" as it has been used in the statement. Why? Because the word "contemporary," whenever used to convey a sense of historical time, is never a disinterested word. Its historicist, as distinct from lit-

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eral, use is always political. Some (the speaker included) are always more contemporary than others. The implicit claim is not that the others are not moving; it is rather that the futures these others are building for themselves through their movements will soon be swamped and overwhelmed by the future the author divines through his reading of evidence. If this sounds like too strong a claim, try the following thought-experiment. Suppose we argue that the contemporary is actually plural, so radically plural that it is not possible for any particular aspect or element to claim to represent the whole in any way (even as a possible future). Under these conditions, a statement such as the one I have quoted would be impossible to make. We would instead have to say that "contemporary culture," being plural and there being equality within plurality, was going many different places at the same time (I have problems with "at the same time," but let's stay with it for the present). Then there would be no way of talking about the "cutting edges," the avant-garde, the latest that represents the future, the most modern, etc. Without such a rhetoric and a vocabulary and the sentiments that go with them, many of our everyday political strategies in the scramble for material resources would be impossible to pursue. How would you get government backing, research funding, institutional approval for an idea if you could not claim on its behalf that it represents the more "dynamic" (or "progressive"-though the word is now tainted) part of the "contemporary," the part rushing headlong into the future as opposed to passing away into the past like the "living dead" in our midst. This is where I think my parents would belong, people waiting for death to realize in a physical form the "fact" of their obsolescence. In this light the statement quoted from During has a certain terrorizing element to it. This terrorism is independent of authorial intention for it is built into the historical construction of time that is invested in the word "contemporary." It addresses the reader's anxiety to survive. It says that to be where the future of "contemporary culture" is, one must relate to The Last of the Mohicans; the alternative is to be not truly "contemporary." Who would want to be left behind? This tyranny and the reader's anxiety are both in a sense "real." For "contemporary culture" is never simply a collection of cultural practices whose plurality could be studied with the pleasure and the innocence of the nineteenthcentury anthropologist. Nor is the future simply a matter of random conjecture. Its making depends on the forces of both political and libidinal economies and of how they work in combination with subtle and not-so-subtle means of institutional coercion. My point then is this: The double gesture built into the idea of the contemporary is symptomatic of the structure of historical time. This structure is impossible to think without looking at society through some variant of the now discredited modernity/tradition binary. (The Marxist version of this sensibility is contained in the concept of the "simultaneity of the non-simultaneous"). This binary is deeply implicated in the politics and the legimitizing narratives of the institutions of modernity (and we have not invented any post-

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modern bureaucracies yet). The academic historian's understanding of time-of society as a layered, sedimented object, an image derived from evolutionist thought-is therefore never innocent of politics. Yet it is its naturalization, the everyday redundancies of its meaning, that allows During's statement to come to us with all the force of a quiet, casual remark. The very "casual" nature of the remark is, of course, a sure sign of how hegemonic the historical understanding of time must be to those who read and write for newspapers. It should be clear by now that I do not advocate as a solution to the problem of historical time something that consists in performing a simple mind-flip. I am not saying, "let's just allow for plurality, let's not name where the future's going, and all will be fine." I grew up in an India which had internalized this hegemonic meaning of "contemporaneity": it had already discarded Gandhi and Gandhians as "inspiring and irrelevant"; I know something about the seductive power of the "story" of capitalist development; I know how, to groups that are already dominant and powerful, a capitalist modernity often seems to embody the most reasonable social arrangement possible; I have seen the consumerist Indian middle classes being hooked on "Santa Barbara" and "The Bold and the Beautiful" relayed to them on Star Television from Hong Kong. At the same time I have cousins who are too poor, too malnourished, and too caught up in their struggle for existence to enjoy this latest benefit of globalization; I also have some knowledge of the tremendous and effective instruments of violence that modern institutions can mobilize. Unlike many other Foucauldians, therefore, I believe in the capacity of the police to make the law real. I am not therefore about fairy-tale solutions. During's statement scares me because it is so true! But there is nothing "natural" about this truth. So long as we need history as a legimitizing device deeply imbricated in the procedures of our institutional lives, there is no getting away from the historical understanding of time. The point is to de-naturalize the very idea of time that allows us to think academic history. It is important to think about how we might, in writing history, write the limits of the conception of time that historians work with. Usually this time is treated as part of the natural order of things. Thus, irrespective of a society'S own understanding of temporality, a historian will always be able to produce a time-line for the globe whose structure is like this:

Time:

Events in:

T1

Area X

Area Y

AreaZ

T2

Area X

Area Y

Area Z

It does not matter if any of these areas were inhabited by peoples such as the Hawaiians or the Hindus who (unlike, as some would say, the Chinese or the Arabs) did not have a "sense of chronological history" distinct from other

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forms of memories before European arrival. Contrary to whatever they may have thought and however they may have organized their memories, the historian has the capacity to put them back into a time we all are supposed to have shared, consciously or not. History as a code thus invokes a natural, homogeneous, secular, calendrical time without which the story of human evolutionlcivilization-a single human history, that is-cannot be told. In other words, the code of the secular calendar which frames historical explanations has a claim built into it that independent of culture or consciousness, people exist in historical time. That is why it is always possible to discover "history" (say after European contact) even if you were not aware of its existence in the past. History is supposed to exist in the same way as the earth does, for instance. That philosophically speaking this time is nothing but a useful fiction, or a set of conventions, a system of representations which becomes "real" (or achieves its truth-effect) only within a particular framework of perception and practice, has been proclaimed by several popular books on modern physics. (What would space-time curvature mean for the sense of time we deploy in history?) Yet most historians choose to take their basic mythological "code," the secular chronology of causation, for granted, as something entirely natural. 6 The evidence, however, quite clearly points to the existence of many different fractures in the assumed homogeneity of the semiotic field called "history." Here I raise the question of non-commensurable temporalities, i.e., conceptions of time that cannot be measured by the same scale and where conversion from one to the other is impossible (just as a great deal of modern physics, explicable only in the symbolic language of higher mathematics, cannot be converted to ordinary prose: you either know the world through that language or you don't, even though the juxtaposition of mutually untranslatable prose and a mathematical language could be methodologically productive). Let me adduce an example from my research in labor history, for it will also allow me to return directly to the point I have already raised in discussing Marx's categories of "real" and "abstract" labor-the project of writing "difference" back into capital. Consider the following description from the 1930s of a particular festival (that is still quite common in India) which entails the worshipping of machinery by workers: In some of the jute mills near Calcutta the mechanics often sacrifice goats at this time [autumn]. A separate alter is erected by the mechanics ... Various tools and other emblems are placed upon it ... Incense is burnt ... Towards evening a male goat is thoroughly washed ... and prepared for a ... final sacrifice .... The animal is decapitated at one stroke ... [and] the head is deposited in the ... sacred Ganges. 7 This particular festival is celebrated in many parts of north India as a public holiday for the working class, the day being named after the engineer-god,

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Vishvakarma. How do we read this evidence in terms of the difference between "real" and "abstract" labor, i.e. in terms of a Marxist narrative? To the extent that this day has now become a "public" holiday in India, it has obviously been subjected to a process of bargaining between employers, workers, and the state. One could also argue that in so far as the ideas of "recreation" and "leisure" belong to a discourse of what makes labor efficient and productive, this "religious" holiday itself belongs to the process through which labor is managed and disciplined and is hence a part of the history of emergence of abstract labor in the commodity form (for the very "public" nature of the holiday shows that it has been written into an emergent national, secular calendar of production). We could thus produce a secular narrative that could apply to any working-class holiday anywhere. Christmas or the Muslim festival Id could be seen in the same light. The difference between Vishvakarma puja (worship) and Christmas (or Id) would then be explained anthropologically; that is, by holding another master code-"culture" or "religion"-constant and universal. This "difference" between "religions" is by definition incapable of bringing the category "culture" or "religion," or for that matter "history," into any kind of crisis. But do every "people" have "culture?" Do they all, strictly speaking, have "religion"? This attempt to translate across heterogeneities by appeal to some universal code, history in this case, that is held to be constant and universal, and in a manner that does not attend politically and ethically to the problem of the untranslatable, is what produces the elitism of the historian's idea of the contemporary. As Michel de Certeau says in discussing G. E. Swanson's work on the Reformation, "The central place awarded to one category of signs establishes the possibility of classifying others as 'delays' or 'resistances' and furnishes the base-or a partial base-for a 'coherence,' for a 'mentality,' or for a system to which everything is referred. ,,' The politics of writing history in such a way as to bring the very code into crisis must lie in developing a political-ethical task of the historian: attending to the fractures in the semiotic field called "history" so that what is unrepresentable is at least allowed to make visible the laws and limits of system of representation. The Indian mill workers' worshipping of machinery as an incarnation of the god Vishvakarma produces a fracture in the code of the historian's secular chronology and causation. It refers to another temporality whose specificity is unthinkable within the code of history. To call it the "simultaneity of the non-simultaneous" or to see it as a "vestige" or a "continuity" from "an earlier time" is to treat "difference" as ineffective and history as a universal to which everything else is convertible. It is to act as though academic history, the knowledge-formation, was not a system of representation, as though it were rather something that did its own work behind us and unbeknownst to us, as natural processes are often thought to be doing. It is, finally, not to take any responsibility for the implication of history, its logic of repre-

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sentation, in the workings of the institutions that govern our lives. Lest I be misunderstood, let me repeat myself carefully: I am not saying that the code of history does not apply to jute-mill workers in Calcutta. But I am saying that this code represents a partial and situated knowledge which derives its validity within the practice of certain institutions (which must include those of law, the nation-state, and the university). There is an outside to this code. There are other ways of worlding which are beyond history. While our scientific truths are the same, our gods and spirits are ofteri interestingly different. The modern exists by converting a lot of this difference into "relics" and monuments. The "real" labor of my mill workers, then-let us say their relationship to their own labor on the day of Vishvakarma puja-is obviously a part of the world in which both they and the god Vishvakarma exist in some sense (it would be silly to reduce this existence to a question of conscious belief). History cannot represent, except through a process of translation and consequent loss of status and signification for the translated, the temporality of that world. History as a code comes into playas this real labor gets transformed into the homogeneous, disciplined world of abstract labor, of the generalized world of exchange where every exchange will be mediated by the sign "commodity." Yet, as the story of the Vishvakarma puja in the Calcutta mills shows, "real" labor inheres in the commodity and its secularized biography; its presence, never direct, leaves its effect in the breach that story makes in history's system of representation. As I have already said, the breach cannot be mended by anthropological cobbling, for that only shifts the methodological problems of secular narratives on to another, cognate territory. In developing marxist histories after the demise of communist party "marxisms," our task is to write and think this breach as we write history (for we cannot avoid writing history). If history is to become a site where pluralities will contend, we need to develop ethics and politics of writing that will show history, this gift of modernity to many peoples, to be constitutionally incapable of living up to its self-proclaimed aims: to re-enact the past, or to describe how it really happened.

NOTES

1. I am grateful to Michael Dutton, Jenny Lee, Fiona Nicoll, Gyanendra Pandey, Rajyashree Pandey, John Rundell, Sanjay Seth and Rachel Sommerville for criticisms of an earlier draft. A different and shorter version of this piece appeared in Polygraph, and then a fuller version in positions: east asia cultures critique (Summer 1994). 2. See Aijaz Ahmad's recent, widely discussed book In Theory which castigates Fredric Jameson, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, and to a lesser extent, Ranajit Guha, Homi Bhabha, and others for slipping into the "reactionary" mud of contemporary French theory.

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3. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 225-226. 4. "Governmentality" was Foucault's word for making a change in models of government in Western Europe in the eighteenth century: the transition from the simple power of law to punish and negate to the forging of a close relationship between the art of governing given bodies of population and the emerging sciences of prosperity. It could be argued, following Foucault, that the rise of disciplinary forms of power was rooted in this transition. See Michel Foucault, "Governmentality" in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Hertfordshire: Harvester, 1991), 87-104. 5. Simon During, Age (19 June 1993). 6. Greg Dening and Ranajit Guha are, among the historians I personally know, two famous exceptions. 7. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History, 89-90. 8. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York, Columbia University Press, 1988), 120-121.

REFERENCES CITED Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory. London: Verso, 1992. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. de Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History, trans. by Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Dening, Greg. Islands and Beaches: discourse on a silent land-Marquesas, 1774-1880. Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1988. Dening, Greg. History's Anthropology: the death of William Gooch. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988. Dening, Greg. Mr. Bligh's Bad Language: passion, power and theatre on the Bounty. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992. During, Simon. "Is Literature Dead or Has It Just Gone to the Movies?," in The Age, 19 June 1993. Guha, Ranajit. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.

- - - . A Nineteenth Century Agenda for Writing Indian History. Calcutta: K P Bagchi, 1988. - - - . "Vernacular History." Meanjin (Melbourne). Special issue on post-colonialism,1992. Henry, Michel. Marx: a philosophy of human reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.

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Henry, Michel, 1.1. Rubin, ]. B. S. Haldane, Everything Has A History. London: Allen and Unwin, 1951. Rubin, Isaak Il'ich. Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, trans. by Milos Samardzija and Fredy Perlman. Detroit, Michigan: Black and Red, 1972. Taussig, Michael. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in Latin America. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1980. Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1990.

3 Workers of the World

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Peter Hitchcock

We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. You know what work is-if you're old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. Forget you. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another. -Philip Levine, "What Work is." is based upon a materialist rather than a metaphysical conceit; an elaboration (in the Gramscian sense), a working out, of a cultural problematic focused on the missing word in the above incantation: "Unite!" That absence, of course, marks a certain reality: the fragmented, diasporic, decentered identities of the present era (a condition that can only be characterized by a cunning metalepsis: all our causes are effects today). It would seem scandalous to invoke once more a nineteenth-century manifesto while removing the word that forms its thesis. But it is equally heretical, or an act of hubris, to leave the nouns of this slogan in place, implacable. Savvy theorists have long since abandoned the worker as sign, or even as an "irruption" along the signifying chain, while the question of "the world" drifts within the dream of simulacra or, even worse, is a symptom of the "t" word, totality, which immediately marks one as an avatar, avant la lettre, of gulag epistemology. I will have cause to remark further on the fateful collision of the errors of humanity within this term (which includes the international derision of labor) by exploring the implications of the conceit for cultural theory. THE FOLLOWING ARGUMENT

71

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But why bother in the first place? The context of this conceit can be indicated in a number of ways. First, while it is clear that the primacy of working-class agency is no longer consonant with social transformation, the marginalization of working-class constituency and agency tout court has serious political and cultural implications at the micro and macro logical levels (this is an argument about cultural politics and class identity rather than categories of economic analysis per se). Second, the diversity and local strategies of late capitalism underline rather than negate the necessity of global critique: transnational capital with a local face is no less insidious than its other formations; therefore, cultural strategy must have more than the neighborhood on its mind, or its partial solutions, while significant, may be more than partially extinguished (the very success of forms of hegemonic oppression in recent years can be defined by the degree to which they can negotiate the local without sacrificing the globalization of their projects). Third, specific forms of cultural criticism have been quick to articulate the post-Fordist realities of "First World," "center," or "northern" social formations in which workers have either "disappeared" (along with their unions), stopped producing, and started servicing, or now measure their dissatisfaction not through an explosion of popular discontent but through the electronic infinities of the implosion of media or any echo of the same; yet much of this criticism is more taciturn when it comes to specifying what a politics of the "post" (post-Fordism, postmodernism, postmodernity, poststructuralism, etc.) can possibly mean to the four-fifths of this beleagured planet for whom the prefix "post" is either a tad premature or simply a misnomer. Fourth, this conceit attempts to confront the hardly remote possibility that the production of workers of the world outside the "First" is a consequence not only of the shifting ground of capitalist exploitation, but also of certain reductive versions of post-ism which celebrate the liberatory pleasures of consumption and style while the people who stitch those labels are caught up in the busy process of self-immiseration somewhere offscreen in a style all their own called aphanisis. But all of this is not a paean to illusory "unity" or solidarity. No. The political project of continually reinvesting cultural criticism with a sense of the cultural production of workers is not a revisionist strategy of workerism intent upon bludgeoning all post-positions with the club of pre-post dicta or formulae. This discussion wants to explore such theoretical positions neither to reject them nor to bolster any of them with the idealism that they can somehow make the subaltern speak (the point is to produce a radical knowledge of the worker without simply having her spoken for).! Clearly, the conceit of workers of the world builds upon the lessons of much of contemporary cultural theory, including those post-isms that have rightly displaced a certain metaphysics of subjectivity: there is no need to reinvent the wheel (including Marx's) where cultures of resistance are at stake. Yet it is equally

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transparent that there are formidable conservative forces within cultural debate that are hardly disappointed by the fact that workers and their cultures are consistently being jettisoned as so much epistemological ballast by theorists who were once (the obligatory date is May '68) their putative advocates. Indeed, one could argue that it is precisely the abdication of the spaces in which the cultural politics of workers are articulated that has allowed the Right (or, let us say, the forces of reaction) to take up the terms of worker politics with such an unnerving sense of unreflexivity. The language of corporate advertising is a lesson in its own right (since it often redeploys radical slogans to opposite effect), but the problem of oppositional discourse in general grows ever more vexing. When one of this century's most reactionary United States vice presidents can, without any irony, bemoan the influence of a "cultural elite," or when defenders of Western classics can accuse multiculturalists (tout court) of "exclusionary practices," the very language of counter-hegemony is not only compromised, it is effectively drained of its correspondence to the real foundations of social relations. Capitalist democracy (the elaborate oxymoron against which marxism and postmarxism breaks) has never walked as tall as when it can deploy the language of dissidence to greater effect than the dissidents. Of course, there are excellent reasons for these "developments" (from theory's point of view, you can own the billboard but not the sign), but these only begin to touch on the rapid displacement and dispersal of debates on workingclass cultures. One legitimate worry is the frightening regularity with which worker politics, or at least the appearance of the same, has produced reprehensible configurations of the nation-state and, in the process, overshadowed or marginalized some equally if not more important characteristics of contemporary oppression. Any cultural criticism that studies this history of suppression must be careful that it does not become the farce of the next generation. Yet, despite the dangers, the challenge should be met lest radical criticism become overly satisfied with ideological critique in which food, shelter, and clothing are categories of consumption without sources of production (in part, this is a problem of over-compensation for Marxism's crises). Here, the aim is a "modest proposal": to rethink the workers of the world without, on the one hand, the "worldliness" which conspires to step over the multiplicities of cultural identity and, on the other, the idealism that class differentiation does not have a significant bearing on the cultural condition of postmodernity and beyond. It is a modest proposal then, that suggests that criticism not consume ("make away with," O.E.D.) the worker, like Swift's conceit about excess Irish babies, but produce ("bring forward," O.E.D.) a working knowledge of worker knowledges paradoxically apposite with the dislocations of the present. Thus, rather than nostalgically pore over the tombstones quickly filling the graveyard of worker politics, the following notes will optimistically suggest that the workers of the world, as a conceit, as a topos of the (ever New-est) times, is

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thoroughly emergent; these notes will seek to articulate a cultural condition of globalized resistance in localized formations. 2 The "permanent" crisis of theories of worker culture has been deepened by the plethora of explanations for the failure of marxist paradigms to adequately explain the eternal deferral of the proletarian triumph over capitalism. This just cause for reflection has played its part in the necessary development of post-ism. Within and between these two realms, a crisis within a certain tradition of thinking and a crisis within the terminological compulsion of a certain moment of capitalism (post-haste, or the rush to "post"), a cultural theory of workers of the world must begin to articulate its difference from the totalizing moment of "unity" and its complicity with the logic, if not the aims, of contemporary "isms." To underline what the dangers and prospects of post-ism are for class cultural critique, the benchmark must be postmarxism. 3 The problem from the outset is not that postmarxist positions are somehow untenable (they have already contributed significantly to radical theory and, like postmodernist arguments, are a fact, not a flux of history), but whether there is any room for the cultural identities of workers within such conceptual apparatuses. Indeed, in some extreme versions of postmarxism the worker barely registers as a blip in the ether of discourse (we might call this the "vulgar" postmarxist position). The use of "worker" in this essay does not assume an automatic identification between worker and class, but that is far from saying that such identification is impossible. The rejection of spontaneous identification is not just a recognition of the potential non-coincidence of consciousness in class formation but a way of suggesting that many determinants of class, including the complex role of surplus labor, condition the difference between worker and working class. Such distinctions are not absolute but their acknowledgment entails various forms of allegiance. For theorists, this includes an analysis of the schisms between Marx and certain strands of marxism beyond the "baby and bathwater" conflation. Put another way, because I might disagree with the political and epistemological foundations of particular forms of marxism my position might be described as "postmarxist," but, because I believe those disagreements rest primarily within marxism rather than within Marx, I resist that appellation. At a moment in history when conservative thinkers are gleefully proclaiming that the world is postmarxist, postcommunist, and post-ideological, this is hardly a moot point. In some respects, it is the very logic of "post" which prescribes not just the displacement of marxism from within its own tradition but the eternal deferral of articulating the components of worker identity within this problematic. The debate around Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is a case in point, but rather than add to the "pamphlets of denunciation'" surrounding this work, I want to note that Laclau in particular has shown a consistent commitment to the rearticulation of socialist politics according to the exigencies of the present, or

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the "contingencies of the possible." This has some fundamental implications for the analysis of worker cultures even if I remain unconvinced that, on the whole, they deserve the label to which they are attached. What, then, in "postmarxism" might be positively invoked within the conceit that structures this essay's title? The conceit of the workers of the world is interested in the micropolitics of cultural agency, but from the standpoint of certain global imperatives. In part, it describes a form of cognitive mapping, but places its emphasis on the "ing" of such activity (the modes of the formation of the map) rather than the totalizing moment of which Fredric Jameson is accused. It is also concerned to eschew developmental models (even uneven ones) of discourse forms for cultures of heterogenous disjunction that link and delink at specific moments in history. Most radical cultural theory is now compelled to articulate the historical emergence of the collision of cultural media (orality, writing, image) with formal components (poetry, novel, cinema/painting/photography) and, say, political structures of dominance (colonialism, postcolonialism, neo-colonialism). The theorist might whirl like a teetotum with such info-overload, but the vertigo is worth risking in order to untangle the formidable strategies of containment that bind (like Ahab to the white whale) radical cultures, and, indeed, their critics. A critique of the constellation of typologies must await another occasion; here I want to take the skepticism of postmarxism (and other polemics) to theorize three components of worker culture that together force a reappraisal rather than a simple dismissal of the word under erasure, "unite."

COMMUNITY

Community has recently been described as "inoperative" and "impossible," which are symptoms not only of communities but the philosophies which describe them. Nevertheless, if we accept that communities are as much imagined as material, and that the discursive nature of identity is fundamentally unstable, having no essential ontological status, then any politics of identity must itself be radically contingent. This Gramscian formula is not necessarily a recipe for despair, but one for alliance politics in hegemonic and counter-hegemomic cultural spheres. Community, for Laclau, is an expression of such contingent collective wills, riddled, as it were, by the strategic identifications of the moment: it is discursive through and through. The discursive practice of community requires a collective ethical knowledge which legitimates it without appeals to universality. This, of course, has been the direction, if not the terminology, of community politics for some time, a politics which has often sought a practical negotiation of local needs with an ethical position that does not move beyond those needs. The advantage of this sense of community is that its

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identity is not decided in advance: its "essential ambiguity" precludes the claims of social management (including those of "actually existing socialism," wherever that is) by opposing the rational/universal ideology redolent in Enlightenment versions of subjectivity. The problem, however, is that communities of interest are very rarely instantaneous, yet in the compressed time/space relations of postmodernity the identity of the moment requires precisely this quality. How can an ethical responsibility be legitimated when its truth claims are wrapped in the ambiguity and ephemerality of floating signification? Can the material conditions of a community wracked, for instance, by poverty, hunger, homelessness, and war be changed without, in the next moment, sacrificing the ethical certitude which produces praxis? A community identity which cannot guarantee the basic needs of survival from one moment to the next is not the embodiment of a philosophy of praxis but one of anxiety (or an example of what Michael Taussig has pithily termed "the nervous system"). In a world where it is estimated that over a billion people have inadequate means of shelter, the philosophical niceties of discursive ambiguity offer very little comfort (ambiguity is a First World [sic] aesthetic: ambivalence is its "other"). But, alas, the ill-housed and homeless have no global knowledge of each other's plight which in any case would be an idealism aspiring to the level of totality. Needless to say, the answer is not a violent swerve to organicism, to Gemeinschaft, nor indeed to Heidegger's ontological idylls to the German peasantry; the answer is perhaps to proffer a sense of community heavily indebted to the contingencies of the possible and to certain sedimentations of identity which inform any and all moments of its existence. Just to underline the scandalous implication of "tradition" in the latter, I would say these sedimentations revolve around questions of memory and experience. Courting accusatory "isms" from every angle, some explanation may be in order. While it is true that the contemporary epoch often announces itself by discontinuity even within the precession of simulacra, community is not finally a measure of radical forgetting or collective amnesia, and certainly not false consciousness-unless we define collectivity as the non-identity of ontological desire, an emptiness about as appealing as annihilation. Even shattered memories (the shard is a condition of memory) refract a sense of communal self. Certainly, the articulation and restatement of memory as part of a community's mode of reference does not produce History-but that is both its power and its specificity. For instance, when workers enunciate the "simplified" sociology of "us and them" in defining their interests in opposition to those who "manage" their existence, they have not been sucker-punched by the dualisms of philosophies of presence: they have identified one of the continuing causes of their immisseration. Slavoj iiiek, the canny Lacanian, would point out that pure opposition is a function of fantasy, and in terms of purity he is right. But if the oppressed recognize a symbol of the extraction of surplus value from

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their labor, are they really in need of an analyst or should they seek solidarity? Whether such a community of interest produces class identity is certainly a complex question and cannot be resolved by simply dismissing the material conditions upon which class makes any significant sense. The making of class identity is not necessarily hindered by memory unless the materiality of the moment is assumed in advance as a product of memory. In fact, considerations of memory preclude an automatic conception of class (or indeed gender, as feminism has long understood) more than they foster political identifications out of step with their realities. The point is that there is no avenue to understanding the restructuring and recomposition of worker lives if their memories are collapsed into the categorical exigencies of ephemera. There are obvious attractions to rejecting the role of experience of class, not least of which is its tendency to obviate the need to examine a full range of subjective identities. Yet there is no inherent reason why one should not be able to specify the class condition of experience within that range. The problem, however, is that class experience is not simply a subjectivist view of one's social role, nor is it only a question of learning from that role: class experience is also composed of determinate conditions that may well be in excess of one's consciousness. Most studies of E. P. Thompson's magisterial The Making of the English Working Class have noted that Thompson either conflates the first two senses of experience or fails to adequately assess the importance of the third, all of which has seriously undermined his notion of agency, by which class experience stands or falls in the first place. The importance of class experience for cultural theory, if not for political science, is that it depends both on the concrete realities of everyday life and on a certain symbolic abstraction to be understood in significant detail. This means paying attention not only to what is felt, lived, or expressed in class terms, and not only to the economic nexus which figures worker experience as a cost of production, but also paying heed to the cultural unconscious of class relations which link the concrete and the abstract at anyone moment of class "existence." The latter point may in fact be the most undervalued component of working-class community identity, the scar that cannot be seen rather than the goods and services produced and consumed (which, by contrast, can be charted like the rise and fall of pork belly prices on the commodity market). The fact that this element of experience is difficult to "measure" is not necessarily its advantage (although indeterminacy has its currency), but anyone interested in the cultural politics of class has probably already taken heart from the tremendous strides made by the new social movements in this form of critique of experience. It is one of the many contributions of feminism that in its most radical forms it has been able to foreground the cultural unconscious of gender in new and complex ways. Obviously, while there is no cultural or political equivalence in the formation of class and gender experience, much has been learned about the productive interference of the respective methodologies used to critique them (materialist

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feminism is exemplary in this regard). Perhaps, because there has been little or no analysis of the sedimentation of experience in the cultural unconscious of diverse workers of the world, this merely confirms the impossibility of the social and class; but maybe it also underlines their "radical undecidability" (which is not the same thing, as Laclau and Mouffe have shown). There is no doubt that working-class communities have been transformed almost beyond recognition in the last twenty years, particularly in those countries where working-class identities had previously "appeared" most stable. In the United States, for instance, post-Fordism has created new sub-strata within the working class. Many workers within heavy industry have either lost their jobs or been retrained, new technologies have required worker reskilling, while in the expanding service sector work has become progressively deskilled and de unionized and, with continual anxiety about unemployment rates and relocation, real wages have generally declined. Specialization and sub-contracting have decentered the traditional rallying cries in the war against exploitation such that periodic layoffs have been naturalized as an occupational hazard. For the long-term unemployed of the working class, who are euphemistically referred to as the "underclass" or the "non-working class," the horrors of late capitalism (or "just in time" exploitation) have been compounded by a concomitant destruction of anything approaching a welfare state. Is community the right word to describe such dislocations? To the extent that there is no one position within a community (with its agglomeration of subject identities and both common and conflicting interests) from which to apprehend all of its possible configurations, it is small wonder that the experience of community is perceived as a mystifying move in cultural theory. Even Raymond Williams, a critic whose work more than any other is a tribute to the power and paradox of working-class community, concedes "the impossibility of understanding contemporary society from experience." Yet this means one cannot begin from the category of experience; it does not mean that communities are not in part characterized by it. The shifting work patterns of the present, the changing roles, the different organizational structures of work, all have a determinate interest in transforming experience, for this process is the very ground on which late capitalism must generate needs, must perpetuate the necessity for its addictive exploitation. Thus, while cultural theory must admit the impossibility of comprehending community through the category of experience, it must continue to contest the uses of experience as a structural imperative of community containment or the management of diversity (which, of course, is the reactionary mode of recent statist appeals to multiculturalism). It is not just capitalism that makes certain communities tenuous, but, among other determinate forms of resistance, also cultural theory's own predilection to concede the ground from which it speaks as if this were commensurate with its own self-knowledge and not with that which would wish to prescribe its margins.

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In the writing of John Berger we can track both a retreat to the margins and an attempt to begin with what Brecht would call the "bad new things" of the present. As Bruce Robbins has noted: "Reading experience against itself without sacrificing its authority, Berger manages to politicize it. ,,5 Paradoxically, Berger's internationalism emanates from the intensity of a very local experience, the "Into their labours" project in the peasant village of Haute-Savoie, France. Berger's "higher knowledge" or "feeling global" is articulated in true Benjaminian style, seizing hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger, the danger of peasant extinction. Berger is not interested in crude humanist recipes; his trilogy records not so much how peasants live, but how they live otherwise-not just in the face of danger, but beyond it. The result of Berger's approach is not only a brilliant evocation of the memory of everyday existence (brute and brave) but a tribute to how people become agents of their future even as it is being made and unmade for them in "moments of danger." There are several problems with Berger's Benjaminian gesture, however, and here I will mention only one of them. The transformation upon which Berger's working knowledge rests is that of the European order, one that Berger himself recognizes but one which must complicate one's sense of "feeling global." For instance, certain Europeans-transnational capitalists come to mind-have been haughtily pursuing the noble art of feeling global for quite some time. True, it is the worldliness of the latter that is extinguishing the world of the European peasantry, but a structural logic of resistance to such domination is also outside the European order of things. Clearly this puts the onus of political change within the realm of experience of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and South America: the very people who are the target if not the material guarantee of so-called First World capitalist social formations. Of course, it is arguable whether the formation of working-class communities during the relatively recent industrialization of the rest of the world follows classical models of analysis (although certain forms of marxism have retained a remarkable explanatory power). The "flexi-local" strategies of international corporate conglomerates, for instance, mean that an identity politics cannot be centered on unionism or welfare for fear that "fixed" capital assets can be quickly "unfixed" and shipped elsewhere (this practice was honed to a fine art of union busting in the metropolitan rust belts of Western Europe and North America-the [former] steel workers of Pennsylvania and the miners of Wales can provide ample testimony of the "virtues" of this strategy). Nevertheless, capitalism's insatiable lust for the subminimum wage has not only persuaded indigenous working classes of the developing world to step in line but convinced local entrepreneurs that they can beat Western capitalism at its own game. In that sense, we may see a more traditional capitalist class in formation in "peripheral" nation-states sandwiched between the international prerogatives of global capital and the local realities of workers newly cognizant of their clear and present dangers. While the characteristics of new worker

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communities are hardly homogeneous, a condition of social and economic antagonism with emergent and entrenched bourgeoisies has not been eclipsed by flexibility nor simply deferred: it is a relatively constant contingency clause around which a major historical narrative dares to coalesce.

II

FLEXIBILITY

It hardly seems serendipitous that at the moment when theorists discovered the flexibility of global capitalism, the prospect of global communism collapsed under the weight of its own intransigence. That this flexibility has provided capitalism with longevity is undeniable; that communism should always have been flexible seems to have gone by the wayside for the present. But further economic and political crises will no doubt cause us to rethink that strange elision among the strange illusions of our present (when communist parties recently scrambled to get "democratic" in their new names, they revealed more than ever the lies which had assured their destiny). One should note here that capitalist flexibility does not mean some kind of Brownian motion in economic relations, a blissful irrationality, a chaos in extremis, but rather a new level of economic organization in which transnational capital dispersal is the brave new law of capital accumulation. For the workers of the world, the emergence of "flexibility" has brought a new dif(erance to exploitation. Flexibility begins at home, in this case in the weakened position of union labor in the so-called First World or Northern economic axis. Over the years this has emboldened employers to seek a variety of work contracts and production sequences, including strategies of sub-contracting and work-week extensions according to up-to-the-minute market data. Only a steadily shrinking core group of employees can enjoy long-term job security and benefits under this regime. Much of the work force therefore lives in an almost constant state of employment anxiety. The most blatant trick of late capitalism is to continually reproduce this condition of disposable labor assets while interpellating workers as able consumers whenever employment allows. Conveniently, the anxiety keeps wage claims to a minimum, and the consumption reabsorbs any and all surpluses that may accrue to the producers. I will remark further on consumption in due course, but the problems posed by flexibility require further comment, particularly regarding a politics of culture. In David Harvey's recent controversial rendering of the "condition of postmodernity" (controversial because, among other misdemeanors, its sweep often assumes the mantle of the "t" word), flexibility looms large and unstable. 6 Flexible production and accumulation are seen to have reorganized socio-economic relations in a profound way; indeed, flexibility has become the linchpin of late-capitalist hegemony (when a credit card company uses the slogan

Workers of the World - - - - ! • 81 "We're flexible" to lure its customers into debt, the structure in dominance becomes almost palpable; but for our purposes the interpretation of flexibility by the IMF and World Bank in recent history would be more revealing). Rather than provide a precis of Harvey's detailed and sometimes persuasive argument, I want to note one of his more provocative suggestions in terms of the conceit at issue. At one point, Harvey opines that postmodernist flexibililty is characterized by "fiction, fantasy, the immaterial (particularly of money), fictitious capital, images, ephemerality, chance, and flexibility in production techniques, labour markets and consumption niches." One would want to alter the list here and there but most of these elements appear in works with "postmodern" in the title. Harvey, however, continues: "yet it [postmodernism] also embodies strong commitments to Being and place, a penchant for charismatic politics, concerns for ontology, and the stable institutions favoured by neo-conservatism.,,7 Most postmodern critiques analyze the former litany in opposition to the latter, but Harvey maintains that both are constitutive of the postmodern condition. In part, this is an attempt to collapse the will to stabilize categories of modernism and postmodernism in relation to the internal dynamics, or flux, of capitalism. Despite the creeping Lukacsian imperative, and the concomitant recidivism of any attempt to reinvoke an earlier moment of New Left polemics, Harvey's move underlines the almost impossible conundrum that flexibility in late capitalism concocts. If the oppressor, in various guises, zigs and zags simultaneously, then opposition appears "limited" to a danse macabre: one must oscillate as best one can, "shifting from one foot to another." True to a tradition of optimism in socialist discourse, such oscillation has its advantages for worker cultures and analysis of the same (because, in another nod to Laclau and Mouffe, this means they are more difficult to manipulate and control). For one thing, most worker histories are structured around the very precariousness of worker existence and the varying strategies of adaptation and resistance that this existence necessitates. A similar remark might be made of colonialism, for the colonial subject was (and still is in certain "neo" configurations) subjected to an instantaneous drive for dispossession (although the mode and condition of dispossession are not synonymous). By the same token, flexibility for workers does not just mean survivability but a continuing contravention of capitalism's strategies of containment (of which resistance rituals in the workplace are an obvious example). In addition, although transnational corporate conglomerates might have technological advantages, they have not been able to regulate sufficiently labor mobility: labor migration and capital flight form discontinuous histories that rarely meet, and even when they do, they do not meet for long. Of course, the dangers for cultural theory are the nimble demons of voluntarism and relativism which are, in their own way, as invidious as the aforementioned credit card ad, for they both show all the signs of flexibility while implicitly bending to a practical politics that ensures rather than denatures the status quo. If anyone doubts the persuasive

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powers of such flexibility, again recall the "miraculous" deployment of "multiculturalism" in contemporary institutional discourse in which, the aforementioned conservative paranoia notwithstanding, the term appears to have solved the problem of difference by cultural accretion. The problem with this is not about whether multiculturalism can occur but about who puts the "multi" in multicultura1. 8 If the marginalized and the oppressed become the agents of their self-representation, then we might have a multiculturalism worthy of the name. Ironically, that would reveal the intransigence of much postmodern flexibility and call into question the power politics that organize its pretty potpourri. Most cultural critiques worth their salt problematize their own relationship to flexibility, but clearly the challenge is to wrest such terms from the reactionary logics to which they have become attached. The oscillation, so far, has not been wild enough.

III

CONSUMPTION

The history of consumption for the workers of the world has occurred twice: the first time as disease (tuberculosis), the second time as the acquiring of things. While the archeaology of working-class diseases remains largely underor unwritten (because they are not intrinsically working class but have been historically specific to working classes), there has been a virtual big bang in the analysis of working-class consumption of things, and with good reason. The exponential interpellation of workers as consumers in the latter part of the twentieth century has been a major motor (if not the major motor) of capitalist expansion, but it has been far from the regulative nirvana espoused by Fordist doctrine. As theorists of popular culture have noted, consumption is not allconsuming and in fact has spurred a rich counter-culture of cut-and-paste resistance. Consumption, the accumulation of things, is not the same as the accumulation of capital, although it may function in that way. Indeed, to think the equivalence between production and consumption leads us to a very different name from capitalism (as Marx reminds us), but that, for the moment, is another story. Here I want to consider the implication of models of consumption for what are often seen as the models of consumption-workers. This is intended not to plunge us back into the heady rationalism of productivist arguments, but to rethink what consumption might mean to identity formation on a world scale when that identity includes, but is not limited to, workers. "Late" capitalism is neither dead nor tardy (it has arrived and is very well; unlike late communism, apparently). For workers, one could argue that it is consumption, not postmodernity, that is the cultural logic of late capitalism. Of course, one of the meanings of postmodernity is consumption (with its

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infinity of meanings it would have to be!), but I want to highlight consumption to underline the popular base of worker cultures rather than the sometimes elitist cultural formations that quote the popular as street chic. The reason worker consumption is different from capital accumulation is not only the unequal register of power between the two but because worker consumption is, to borrow from Mikhail Bakhtin, potentially answerable. Bakhtin uses answerability to measure the relationship between art and life in individual being; here I invoke it to suggest that the act of consumption in worker cultures entails responsibility, what Bakhtin calls a "guilt or liability to blame.,,9 Where the capitalist seeks limited liability in the maintenance of profits (or losses), the worker is caught in an endless cycle of culpability that derives from opportunity cost: does it please me and feed me? A map of the world can be drawn according to the relative weight accorded each desire: those who are most answerable for consumption are those for whom the pleasure principle is the most acute problem. The affluent workers of advanced industrial/service economies have known more than subsistence for several generations, but even as that equation is beginning to falter it still represents a qualitative difference in consumption models. Indeed, the nexus of choice and ability is a function of identity in difference-the kind of difference, of course, that governs Marx's notion of exchange value. Marx was not much interested in the "thingness" of the thing exchanged, which conversely in part explains why much contemporary marxism has little trouble with the psychoanalysis of exchange (from Lacan on) or indeed fictitious capital. The problem remains, however, how the role of exchange produces the identity of change and how one is to theorize this without "isms" of indulgence (say, functionalism or pragmatism). Although he is much maligned as the granddaddy of the dialectic, Jameson has persevered in producing an architectonic scheme of exchange value that neither demeans consumption nor celebrates it as the apotheosis of revolutionary zeal. In fact, although in Jameson's extended critique of Adorno he does not say as much, exchange value, as the linchpin of identity formation, governs both the centering of the subject and its eclipse; it conditions subjection at the same time as it offers transcendence. Thus, while Jameson quotes approvingly that moment in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory where the affirmation of the subject is the pre-condition for its sublime annihilation (albeit of the temporary aesthetic variety), one gets little sense of the consequences of consumption along different trajectories of power. This is where Jameson's Adorno book might be read into his heavy (though not as dense) tome on postmodernism. 10 There, in a set of provocative cultural readings, consumption is clearly seen as a form of production, not because it produces meanings (although, of course, that is the case) but because it expands capital circulation (and, for capitalists, exacerbates the thorny problem of making workers consume while limiting their surpluses). To be sure, much of this argument can be found in Marx (particularly in the

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Grundrisse), but Jameson has a lot of fun finding its correlative in a generally conservative model by Gary Becker (of recent Nobel fame). For this argument, the productivity of contemporary consumption raises the stakes in the international cultural divisions of labor, for consumption as exchange "develops" unevenly and structures the core logic of neo-colonial manifestations. Signs of this can be registered in the continuing appearance of obsolete capital equipment in "developing" countries and the dumping of low-quality consumer durables wherever high rates of profit return are promising (and in the peripheral or semi-colonial states this is almost always the case). The infamous joint venture is often an omen of fortunate (and fortune-making) primary and secondary exploitation, providing both the advantage of labor-intensive accumulation with low costs and a relatively new market for cheap and expensive product imitations. The answer is not a rejection of the consumer model because capitalist consumption processes are also extensions of necessary needs. Difficulties arise, however, in the tendency to read all consumption as potentially a form of resistance. This does not necessarily help cultural criticism specify the varying effects of consumption on a world scale, the defiance and the dross, the reaccentuation and the regulation. Consumption is a primary arena of contestation for the workers of the world, but it cannot be reduced to questions of choice: this is what is meant by the earlier reference to style as aphanisis, for the aura of choice is often a misrecognition of the real foundations of worker communities. The inequalities of exchange mark the ground zero of identity formation, whether in language, steel, or satellites. While challenges to such inequality do not always manifest themselves over ownership (hence the utopian impulse of consumption), they are often driven by a class imperative or the necessity of expressing opposition in class terms. Although that might pitch workers of the periphery against their "post" -industrial counterparts, cultural theory must continue to develop global critiques that understand and, if necessary, promote such disjunctions (since answerability is not only the "lack" of the capitalist classes). Does such struggle undermine the traditional bipolar reading of social antagonism? By extending it one does not collapse the model but recognizes that the antagonism over consumption does not describe the limit of the social but rather the points at which exchange occurs. This, of course, is a problem of socio-economic relations of communities which, although invisible (rather than inoperative or impossible), are crucial co-ordinates in the shifting patterns of worker identity, with class as one chain of equivalence.

IV

----!"

The daunting time/space compression of the contemporary ethos means that the dislocations of flexibility and consumption weigh heavily against the "reali-

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ties" of community, particularly against its last three syllables. Apparently, one cannot organize ephemera into a hegemonic bloc, one can only celebrate the fleeting "eventness" of such moments. I have argued elsewhere that the major structural logic of working-class culture is the "cultural event," the orchestra with no conductor, the stage with no director. But while this principle works quite well for "advanced" capitalist societies, its formal components look quite different where grassroots class activism holds an impertinent (or oblivious) sway. In that sense, community is stronger at the periphery because there is still a belief that something is in danger of being lost as well as gained under neocolonial and postcolonial machinations. Workers of more recently industrialized nation-states have generally yet to feel the full impact of the speed of fictitious capital flight on their community and organizational bases. Rest assured, the disruptions of rapid overaccumulation and relocation will quickly denature traditional confines of solidarity as indigenous working classes compete to be the better slaves to "progress." But growth and relative wealth are not only the benefits of capitalist development but obviously the seeds of its crises, and about those, workers are rarely quiescent. The cultural representations of this are not just riots against the International Monetary Fund (and the UN), but a whole host of strategies in which language, form, and function are reconfigured as resistance and, to borrow from Samir Amin, delinking. But how can one speak of agency? The cultural agency of workers was never a major problem if one ascribed to the long or gradualist view of social revolution. Instant identities, however, curtail the process if not the outcome. Rather than pushing the problem back into the confines of community, agency should be read into flexibility and consumption as well. This means that combinatory practices are not limited to institutional or organizational affiliation but also rest on unofficial decisionmaking and interventionist processes. Ultimately, the real foundations shift when these practices coalesce (the moment of class if not class consciousness), but the absence of that praxis should not deter analysis of worker cultures themselves because they are signs if not signposts, heterogenous and contradictory, of the crises of globalization. Again, the decentering of identity does not mean its obliteration, as many a thriving schizo-capitalist will tell you. The "how" of apprehension of worker culture on a world scale is particularly vertiginous for, unlike a transnational corporate advertising strategy for the same product in different markets, cultural critique is ultimately interested in collective reciprocity, the "translation relations" of cultural identity. While several analyses-one thinks of those of Jameson, Spivak, and Harlow-have already made important contributions to the globalization of critique, there is little, if any, exegeses of worker cultures with a theoretical framework that can move beyond the confines of nation or region. I have deliberately downplayed the function of nation here, although clearly it is capitalism's major contingency clause, the measuring rule which flies in the face of its own

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transnationalism. And yet, of course, it can be an important strategy of displacement, for when workers have raised the national flag they have often been unable to raise themselves. National identity has often papered over the internal divisions of worker subjectivity (such questions of gender, race, ethnicity, and labor aristocracy are pertinent in this regard) and, despite intimations of anachronism, the ideology of nation continues to exert a stronger force on worker identity than class consciousness. Capital, of course, is significantly less impeded by the dictates of national allegiance. Thus, an internationalist critique would have to specify how worker cultures are positioned by different practices and discourses, and how they make and unmake those positions through a relative autonomy from other spheres of influence. Against amnesia and aphanisis such work could offer context and, where possible, continuity; against information as entertainment it might offer knowledge as struggle; against the flexi-Iocal flattening out of cultural content (variously known as cultural imperialism, neo-colonialism, or sometimes "Coca-colonization" and "Americanization") it might stress an internationalism more intent on attenuating the global homogenization of experience and expression; and against a "we are the world" idealism that insists that "First" World culture must legislate the rest (and maybe end a famine or two on the way) such an approach could stress the radical contingency of various collectivities that contest the international inequities of the market. But these are perceptions not prescriptions. I began with a conceit about the absence of the word "unite!" when reading a tatty old manifesto into the pristine present. The above is not meant to reinscribe that word as if nothing has happened, but to explore some components of contemporary criticism that might keep "workers of the world" operative in cultural discourse. Rather than resort to organicism, base/superstructure models, or productivism I have attempted to problematize community, stress flexibility, and laud at least some of the implications of consumption. This is not out of nostalgia for the worker politics of yesteryear but out of a belief that the increasing absence of worker identity from cultural debate seriously undermines oppositional critique. Philip Levine's reminder about "what work is" is also a poetic memorandum about worker identity, for just as unemployed workers slip quickly through the nets of representation, so too do workers in much contemporary theory that is often more haste than post. Perhaps by rediscovering what work other than their own is, theorists might learn who the workers of the world are. This leads us, somewhat optimistically, from conceit to allegory. Esu, the Yoruba trickster, and Minerva's owl of Greek fame were both mythological messengers whose messages depended greatly upon the work of their perception. Their labors in myth tell us not only about the myths of labor but also about labor's (virtual) realities. The mythical messengers, like contemporary theorists, knew that the world was greater than the language they might use to comprehend it. But did that stop them working?

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NOTES

1. This lesson on subalternity is drawn from the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, particularly her essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?," in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313. As my first sentence makes evident, Gramsci also lurks within this formula. 2. Raymond Williams's Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) and The Sociology of Culture (London: Fontana, 1981) both contain useful extrapolations on cultural formations. Whether our whirligig present allows for cultural emergence or is itself a statement of emergence would require more comment than the present essay allows. There is, however, a lesson in the ephemerality of "New Times" which suggests that the analysis of cultural formations should not be confused with the prerogatives of much broader political programs. Hence, the "modest proposal" of my thesis. 3. The "debate" about postmarxism has been pursued in several journals, including New Left Review and Social Text and has inevitably spilled over into books by Norman Geras and Ernesto Laclau. Here I make no claims to either justify or provide a full critique of this trend-I am merely commenting on the implications of postmarxism for working-class cultural critique. 4. This is Laclau's witty phrase for Geras's attack on his and Chantal Mouffe's work. The initial thesis is mapped out in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985). 5. Bruce Robbins, "Feeling Global: John Berger and Experience," in Postmodernism and Politics, ed. by Jonathan Arac (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 159. 6. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). For our purposes, Harvey's study would have to be tempered by a politics of difference which, while attentive to class identity, remains duly cognizant of the multiplicities of social determination. There are several problems with Harvey's approach. See, for instance, Meaghan Morris's provocative review essay, "The Man in the Mirror: David Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity," Theory, Culture & Society 9 (1992): 253-79. 7. Ibid. 339. 8. I have discussed this elsewhere; see "Multicultural Materialism," Rethinking Marxism 5(1) (Spring 1992): 78-79 and in "Mythologies of Multiculturalism" (unpublished manuscript). At the present time, multiculturalism signifies both an impetus towards a more democratic cultural politics and a drive for more efficient late capitalist corporate strategies. 9. Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, trans. by Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 9.

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10. See Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 1990) and Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). Like Harvey, Jameson is often berated for wearing an old hat. Of course, the "t" word looms rather large in this regard, but the question of capitalist globalization cannot be adequately addressed merely by dismissing Marxist approaches to totality, which are neither univocal nor inconsequential to an understanding of various mutations of capitalism in history.

4 Subject for a Feminist Standpoint Kathi Weeks

I

INTRODUCTION

FEMINIST STANDPOINT THEORY is often portrayed as a relic of a bygone era in Anglo-American feminism: a throwback to an outmoded 1970s agenda, an archaic mode of theorizing anchored in the second rather than the third wave, a humorless operation in contrast to a playful gesture, an obsolete approach situated within a modernist as opposed to a postmodernist horizon.! This assessment is, at least in part, a legacy of the more reductive formulation of the modernist-postmodernist debate of the 1980s in which modernism (and with it, Marxism in general and feminist standpoint theory in particular) is presented as "the Enlightenment," poststructuralism-depicted as "postmodernism"-is posited as its archenemy, and the rest of us are constrained by the relentlessly oppositional logic, employed to maintain this dualistic frame, to choose either one side or the other. Not only does this reading distort existing examples of standpoint theory, what is more important, it discounts the potential of this theoretical tradition to generate variations capable of contributing to feminist theories and practices in and beyond the 1990s. In the pages that follow I propose a series of unexpected encounters and unexplored affinities in order to further the project of locating and developing this potential. This will include considerations of Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, Gilles Deleuze's reading of the Nietzschean thought of the eternal return, Kathy Ferguson's endorsement of irony as a feminist practice, and Antonio Negri's concept of self-valorization. The version of standpoint theory that emerges from these selective engagements incorporates certain aspects of these projects in a way that I believe can enhance some of standpoint theory'S fundamental strengths and demonstrate its continued relevance to contemporary feminist the-

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ories and practices. Beginning with a selective reading of specific examples of feminist standpoint theory, I attempt to identify and develop a few of their most compelling elements. 2 It seems to me that the strengths of these theories, their ability to speak to the experiences of broad audiences of women-particularly women outside the academy-and their commitment to locating immanent possibilities for collective forms of resistance derive in large part from their attention to labor. Consequently, I focus in particular on those versions that, drawing directly or indirectly on the Marxist tradition, ground a feminist standpoint in some account of women's laboring practices. These feminist standpoint theories begin from the assumption that what we do can have consequences for who we are and what and how we think, and that what we do is determined in part by a gender division of labor.3 Depending on how it is delimited, the practices for which women are disproportionately responsible (in the context of Western capitalist formations) are described in terms of caring labor, emotionallabor, reproductive labor, and labor in the concrete bodily mode (both in the household and in the wage-labor economy), as well as kin work and homework. 4 Not only are these practices typically rendered invisible, many of the skills developed in and through this socially necessary labor are naturalized and undervalued (Rose 1986, 165). Standpoint theorists generally focus on exploring the potential epistemological consequences of this gender division of labor. These practices can suggest alternative methods or knowledges which, depending on the account, refuse the subject-object split, emphasize relational thinking, and revalue the concrete, everyday, and bodily dimensions of existence. Here, I focus instead on a relatively neglected dimension of these theories; namely, the ontology that informs a standpoint and the constructions of subjectivity to which it gives rise. One cannot, however, explore this topic without simultaneously addressing the problem of essentialism. There are two types of essentialism that concern me here: those in which the subject is posed as a pre-existing constituting agent, and those in which the subject is conceived as a passively constituted effect. The first is associated with voluntaristic models of political agency and the second with theories of social determinism. I will proceed, then, to articulate the relationship between the ontology of labor and the subject of a standpoint in terms that can, hopefully, move us beyond this opposition between voluntarism and determinism. II

THE ONTOLOGY OF LABOR: LABOR AS AN IMMANENT, CREATIVE, AND STRATEGIC CATEGORY

Labor is the basic building block of this version of feminist standpoint theory. But before describing what the role of labor is, I should clarify what it is not. First, the notion of women's labor proposed here is not a set of practices allo-

Subject for a Feminist Standpoint • 91 cated to women by nature (that is, it does not entail a biological essentialism). The gender division of labor is the product of culturally and historically specific determinations, not the inevitable product of sex differences. The laboring practices that figure in these versions of feminist standpoint theory-caring labor, kin work, labor in the concrete bodily mode, etc.-have no necessary connection to women's specific biological capacities. Neither is women's labor tied to some conception of an essential humanity (that is, a metaphysical essentialism), as can be found in some versions of humanist Marxism that privilege the concept of alienation. Rather than an original, authentically human essence from which we are estranged and to which we should be restored, labor refers in this account to variable practices that are constitutive of ever-changing forms of existence and modes of subjectivity. In contrast to both of these approaches, labor is posited here as an immanent and creative force of social production and historical change. 5 We can locate an instructive formulation of this conception of labor in the work of Marx and Engels. They explain the premises from which they begin (in highly polemical terms) as "real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity" (1978, 149). These premises are then separated for analytical purposes into four specific claims. The first premise of history is that human beings-those who collectively "make history"-must meet their basic subsistence needs. If we can presume life as a fundamental fact, then we can also presume that life can be sustained. The second premise is that the satisfaction of these needs leads to the production of new needs; necessity, they suggest, is for the most part an historical construct. Third, they presume that humans reproduce one another and fourth, that social relations of cooperation develop in the process. According to Marx and Engels, this mode of cooperation is a "productive force": As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production (1978, 150).6 Along these lines, then, labor is conceived in our account as an immanent ontological dynamic. As Marx describes it, "[l]abour is the living, form-giving fire: it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time" (1973,361).7 In other words, labor serves as a causal force or principle of historical motion. Dorothy Smith describes the ontological assumptions of her standpoint theory in very similar terms: These practices, these objects, our world, are continually created again and again and are already social. Because they arise in actual activities, they are always coming into being as a local historical process, falling

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away behind us as we move forward into the future. They are being brought into being (1987, 135). When deployed in the context of a Marxist analysis that rejects all notions of necessary developments and predetermined ends, the category of labor, as it is elaborated here, leads us to a field of constitutive practices, forces of assertion, or lines of movement that provides us with a particular angle of vision on and site of intervention into the social construction of subjectivities. The category of labor is also intrinsically strategic; which is to say that its philosophical attributes-in this case, its immanence and creativity-