Marxism – Post-Marxism (Neo-Marxism)

Category: Theoretical approaches

Post-Marxism, together with structural Marxism and analytical Marxism is part of neo-Marxism, the strain of Marxist thought that started in 1940is. Post-Marxist authors don't have a unified theoretical or methodological approach but what unifies them is the departure from the strict deterministic logic of historical materialism. Post-Marxists pay much more attention to problems of politics, ideology, and power (superstructure) than to the economy and social relations of production (structure), at least, more than classical Marxists. Post-Marxist thought starts with the works of Antonio Gramsci and Henri Lefebvre.

Antonio Gramsci

Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci is known for his posthumously published book, of which the most famous and influential is Prison Notebooks (1947). The epistemological foundations of Gramsci's sociology are based on the scientific method and positivism. He wanted to apply the methods of the social sciences to the study of history and politics, to establish the laws of social evolution. On the other hand, he was very skeptical about the "law of large numbers" and the use of official statistics. Gramsci did not present a coherent sociological theory in his writings, but his sharp criticism of Italian bourgeois sociologists is obvious, as well as his balanced critical attitude towards Marx and other Marxists, and above all Nikolai Bukharin. He rebukes Bukharin for vulgarizing historical materialism by presenting it as sociology. Gramsci believes that historical materialism represents the "historicization of philosophy", that is, a true philosophy of practice. Unlike Marx, who focused almost exclusively on structure (base), Gramsci attached much greater independent importance to the social superstructure. In addition, he was a great opponent of the deterministic interpretation of Marx's Capital. Gramsci rejects the existence of historical inevitability and observes social changes as a result of complex historical processes.

The emphasis on the importance of social development is best seen in Gramsci's conception of "cultural hegemony". The ruling class in capitalist societies does not rule only through force and repression but imposes its own ideological system, which defends the interests of the ruling class, and other subordinate classes. This imposed value system is what Gramsci calls "cultural hegemony." Hegemony is a synthesis of political, intellectual, and moral leadership within the ruling class. This leadership justifies its interests by creating an image of the world that presents those interests and the economic and political relations that sustain those interests as positive for the entire population. When other classes (which Gramsci calls "subaltern") accept such a picture of the world as normal and common sense, or even better, as the only possible one, then those classes become integrated into that ruling cultural hegemony.

The capitalist class integrates subaltern classes in two ways. On the one hand, it gives them small concessions - workers' rights, allows the work of trade unions, creates a social security system, and the like. On the other hand, the state and civil society create institutions and organizations - educational institutions, the press, churches, and civil associations - that promote this cultural hegemony. In addition, the state creates institutions - police, army, prisons, psychiatric institutions - that carry out repressive measures against those who do not accept hegemony. The capitalist class also has its independent ways of achieving obedience, through the realization of control and punishment in the workplace itself, but also through employment itself, because most workers without capitalist employment cannot even survive.

Gramsci believed that the survival of such hegemony is not necessary. The capitalist society produces intellectuals who serve the interests of the capitalist class by spreading and justifying hegemony. Gramsci calls such intellectuals "traditional intellectuals." Traditional intellectuals are hierarchically structured in relation to their own function within hegemony. At the top are creative intellectuals who produce a view of the world, in the middle are the organizers, and at the bottom are the administrators. However, the working class and the communist parties need to gather a new type of intellectual, who will spread, among the exploited classes, a different image, that of the truth of the revolution. He calls such intellectuals "organic intellectuals" and they should fight for the needs and demands of the exploited masses.

Organic intellectuals do not have to be only those who are highly educated, but they can be all those who have some organizational function within production, culture, politics, or administration. As hegemony is created and operates equally at the macro and micro levels, through actors (intelligentsia) who create new values, organic intellectuals have room to crack the dominant hegemony and provide space for critical awareness of the possibility of changing the dominant system. Withdrawal of creative intelligentsia from hegemony will cause an organic crisis of authority and social disintegration.

Subaltern classes, to realize their interests, must consciously and purposefully create their own intellectuals, activists, and theorists, to successfully fight against the hegemony of the capitalist class. The proletariat must bring into civil society its own values and culture, which will work not only for the interests of the working class but for the interests of universal socialism. In that way, they will force the whole society, and finally, the traditional intellectuals, to actively accept the validity and historical necessity of the new hegemony and achieve the ultimate goal - the creation of socialist hegemony. Gramsci was very careful in his views on creating the dictatorship of the proletariat because he believed that other classes also had their own interests that should be taken into account, especially the peasantry. He saw how the peasants in the poor south of Italy were suffering, and he believed that the socialist strategy should not require the peasants to become workers but help them understand their position and fight for emancipation together with the workers.

Henri Lefebvre

French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre studied at the University of Paris and taught at the Universities of Strasbourg and Nanterre. His intellectual work is connected with his participation in the Communist Party of France, from which he was expelled in the late 1950s because of his heretical views. After that, he worked closely with the founders of the Socialist International and representatives of student protests. Three main themes run through his theoretical work: the development of Marxist philosophy and practice (dialectical Marxism), the study of everyday life, and the problems of urban space.

With the publication of the book Dialectical Materialism (1940), Lefebvre became one of the most influential representatives of this direction of Marxism. His heterodox dialectical materialism carries the influences of Marx, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Lefebvre's dialectical materialism emphasizes the problems that arise in the cultural and existential dimensions of the capitalist mode of production. Alienation is the most important consequence of modern capitalism, which makes it impossible to achieve human authentic self-realization. The dialectical perspective emphasizes the constant presence of contradictions in society, but also the possibility of overcoming them through practices aimed at combating the system, and creative and concrete ideas that change collective practice. The goal of philosophy, sociology, and economics should be to find a solution through which the "return of man to himself" would be achieved and thus overcome the problem of alienation. The ultimate goal is the realization of a "total man" who exists in a society in which inequalities and alienations have been eradicated.

His interest in dialectics and alienation was also expressed in the book Critique of Everyday Life (2014, in French 1947, 1961, 1968, 1981), which had four volumes that were published over three decades. In these books, Lefebvre studies everyday life, which is not banal but represents a direct product of a society governed by consumerism and the bureaucratization of life. Everyday life is the best indicator of how the capitalist mode of production has shaped modern society. Bureaucratization and consumerism have impoverished and taken away authenticity from everyday life. Capitalism, marketing, and the liberal-democratic state have created a "bureaucratic society of organized consumption". On the other hand, everyday life contains the seeds of resistance to such a system, because it preserves the collective memory of alternative practices and supports the development of strategies and movements that challenge the existing social order.

Lefebvre made a huge contribution to the development of rural sociology, and later in his career, he made an even greater contribution to urban sociology. His books The Right to the City (in French 1968), From the Rural to the Urban (in French 1970a), The Urban Revolution (2003, in French 1970b), The Right to the City II - Space and Politics (1972b) and The Production of Space (1974) are the most important books with urban sociology as a topic. He believes that the city is the best place to study capitalism, due to the degradation capitalism brought to the city. Capitalism, through speculation with land and real estate, extends commodification to living space. In addition, the capitalist organization of urban space creates segregation of social groups, and this has the most negative impact on the working class.

The city should be studied on three levels of analysis: global (as a space shaped by the capitalist mode of production), mixed (as a mediator between the state and everyday life of people), and private level (the everyday life of people in private space). In the historical dimension, the city has gone through three phases: a political city, a commercial city, and an industrial city. With the arrival of socialism, we would enter the fourth and final phase of the development of the city, and through the "urban revolution" a humane urban society would be created. Lefebvre sees urban space as a place where the state and capitalists want to commercialize space (in which technocrats dealing with architecture, urbanism, and planning play a significant role), but also as a place where opponents of this situation want to create alternative spaces - "Heterotopias" - for self-realization through art, communes and similar forms. The urban revolution is the culmination of this defense of the "right to the city".

In On the Other Side of Structuralism (1971), Lefebvre seeks to construct what he called "structural historicism." He resolutely rejects Althusser's division of Marx's thought into young and old Marx. Lefebvre also believes that the introduction of the boundaries between history and sociology is wrong, which is also visible in Marx's approach in which dialectical existence is connected to a formal structure. Marx believed that dialectical contradiction is deeper than structural contradictions. Lefebvre advocates the introduction of a regressive-progressive method, which connects the micro-social level of everyday life with the macro-social level.

Other Influential Post-Marxists

American sociologist Wright Mills explored the radical policies of union leaders in the book New Men of Power (1948) and fined that their potential for substantial economic transformation was limited. Although the union leaders had great power, they were anti-socialist and did not oppose the capitalist class or the state bureaucracy enough. After this research, Mills stopped believing in Marx's idea that the working class would be the main engine of social change.

In the book White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951) Mills attributed the increase in the size of a part of the middle class, the so-called "white collars", to three processes: the growth of bureaucracy in all spheres of work, the development of technology, and the growth of industrial production. Corporations are getting bigger, so former small entrepreneurs are becoming ordinary employees within large companies. The growth of bureaucracy in companies requires the creation of more managerial levels within companies, and these levels are linked into chains of superiority and subordination. At each level, specific coordination and supervision of subordinate employees take place.

White-collar workers, unlike experts from earlier periods, do not represent independent professionals but are completely subject to bureaucratic control and manipulation within the companies in which they work. The huge increase in bureaucracy was driven by the idea of rationalizing the world, a type of rationalization that leads to standardization of work and rules, depersonalization, and loss of personal autonomy, all to increase efficiency, coordination, and control. In addition to their expertise, white-collar companies sell their own personality to the companies, because they have to suppress all forms of resistance and dissatisfaction, and they have to respect a strict way of behaving and living, at work and outside of it. The rise of white-collar jobs showed that Marx's prediction that almost the entire society would be divided into capitalists and manual workers did not come true. The division of labor has led to the work of white-collar workers being very limited to a specific task within the company, and the work process itself being very routine and automated. This has led to a reduction in autonomy and the expansion of semi-professional jobs, which have a low level of authority, income, and prestige.

White-collar workers are experiencing increasing alienation, both at work and outside of work. Mills saw a decline in the reputation, autonomy, power, and income of white-collar workers, and in addition to the previously mentioned causes, he cited an increase in the population with higher education, increased white-collar unemployment, and a reduction in the pay gap between white-collar workers and manual workers. University education has also transformed, so it is increasingly focused on the adoption of practical knowledge and social values that serve to better prepare students for effective integration into large bureaucratic systems in the business or government sphere.

Power in such bureaucracies occurs in three forms: 1) coercive power, 2) power based on faith in one's authority, and 3) manipulative power. Manipulative power is becoming dominant and is based on the application of sophisticated methods of science and technology. The application of the principles of scientific management and the huge centralization of decision-making enables the use of manipulative power. Manipulative power is applied less visibly, and the goal is to manipulate workers to internalize the values imposed on them by their superiors and serve only the interests of those superiors. Outside the workplace, manipulative power is exercised through several channels: 1) mass media, which promotes entertainment and sports, while at the same time obscuring real economic and political problems, 2) through marketing that promotes consumerism, 3) through an education system that instills the values necessary for the survival of the system, and 4) through religious organizations that give the values of American capitalism a sacred aura.

Mills' book The Power Elite (1956) explores elites in the USA. The elite in the United States controls large bureaucratic organizations within three sectors: private corporations, state administration, and the military. Members of all three mentioned elites share many common features: they were born in the upper classes, they went to the same private schools and the most elite universities, and they belong to the same private social clubs. Members of the elite who are not from the upper classes most often perform technocratic jobs: managers, professionals, and lawyers. Elites keep their positions, intergenerationally, by mostly getting married within the elite, but also on the intergenerational level, so that the same person changes positions during his career and moves from one to the other two elites. The integration of the elite is accompanied by the growing integration of these three sectors. The elite within the state administration pursues policies that suit the economic interests of corporations, the corporate elite finances the political elite, while the military elite depends on the political elite and creates a "military-industrial complex" with the corporate elite. Of these three sectors, the sector of private corporations has the greatest power.

Conflicts within the elite take place at the middle level of power, mainly over the division of spoils, and the media and political scientists pay the most attention to these conflicts, while no one questions the fundamental basis of the system itself. Conflicts within the elites are becoming increasingly integrated into the bureaucratic state apparatus, which replaces the real political struggle between political parties. Trade unions and other professional organizations tend to integrate into the state, and their leaders fight only for their own interests or for the interests of their own members. Below the elite is the class of white-collar workers, which, compared to the earlier middle class of small capitalists and professionals, has lost its autonomous power. At the bottom of the pyramid is a huge mass of ordinary people who are disorganized, uninformed, completely apathetic, indifferent, and without any real power, but are completely controlled and manipulated. The very high concentration of power that the elites have and the apathy and powerlessness of the largest part of the population, represent an exceptional threat to democracy.

The bureaucratic rationality of the elite seeks to prevent huge masses of people from approaching life's problems autonomously and rationally. As a solution to the problem of lack of democracy in the United States, Mills offers the following proposals: 1) educating the general public who would be informed and involved in making important decisions, 2) creating "nationally responsible political parties" that would clearly and openly fight for specific policies, 3) creating real intelligentsia, which would deal with the most important issues, 4) creation of strong state services independent of corporate interests, 5) formation of mass media that would properly inform the public about the most important issues, 6) creation of strong associations that would connect individuals, communities and the public.

German sociologist Claus Offe deals with the topics of the state, capitalist economy, civil society, social democracy, and the welfare state. In Contradictions of the Welfare State (1984), Offe studied what he calls the "crisis of crisis management" in social security systems in capitalist countries. He believes that the modern state is no longer able to fully solve the socio-economic problems and conflicts of late capitalism. In his book Disorganized Capitalism (1985), Offe views modern Western democracies as disorganized systems full of problems: divisions in the labor force, declining role and strength of trade unions, and weakening liberal-democratic and neo-corporative governance mechanisms.

Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis is known for studying autonomous societies. These are societies that actors can change or reform by thinking about them. There were only two types of autonomous societies in history, both self-organizing with a strong civil order. The first type was the ancient polis, while the second type appeared after the twelfth century in Western Europe. Autonomous societies are characterized by high levels of artistic and scientific achievements, which is a consequence of the imagination needed to maintain this type of society. Self-organizing autonomous societies are characterized by orderliness, and imagination is responsible for creating laws and norms. The decline of creativity in the West, after 1950, in his opinion, is a consequence of the spread of postmodern conformism.

Austrian-French sociologist André Gorz is known for his critique of capitalism, which is based on the study of ecology and the position of the working class. He hoped that in the future, increasing productivity would lead to an improvement in the quality of individual and social life, instead of leading to an intensification of the unscrupulous capitalist struggle.

With the publication of the book Ecology as Politics (1978, in French 1975), Gorz became one of the most important representatives of political ecology. He believed that political ecology must critically approach economic thought because the understanding of wealth must overcome the narrow notion of values used by economists. In his book Farewell to the Working Class (1994, in French 1980), Gorz notes that organizational and technological changes have destroyed skilled labor. The product of this is that the working class, as a class that has the knowledge and ability to take control of the means and the production process, no longer exists, so we need to say farewell to it. Gorz also believed that the basic problem is not only the destruction of labor but that the system imposes the ideology of labor as a source of income rights. He advocates that instead of the right to work, the right to income should be advocated for everyone, regardless of whether they are employed or not. Gorz advocated socialism that would preserve individual autonomy.

British sociologist Paul Hirst in the book Pre-capitalist Forms of Production (1975), co-authored with Barry Hindess, critiques the classical Marxist view of feudalism and the Asian mode of production. Authors believe that the key relationship for feudalism is the economic appropriation of surplus by the owners of the land, from those who cultivate that land, regardless of the legal form (tax, rent) of appropriation of surplus. In addition, the specific legal position of those who cultivate the land is not important for feudalism, unless they are slaves. Feudalism, as an economic form, can be applied to any agrarian society, regardless of whether it is at the state stage or not.

Argentinian-British sociologist Ernesto Laclau in the book Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977) developed the Marxist theory of ideology and politics, and in shaping his theory he relied mostly on the theories of Gramsci and Althusser. In his opinion, classical Marxism fell into the reductionism of economic and class determinism. Laclau believes that there is relative autonomy of the capitalist state in some special historical circumstances. In addition, some ideologies are not based on class identity, and examples are populist ideologies, such as Nazism and fascism, which are accepted by members of completely different classes.

In his book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), written with his partner Chantal Mouffe, the authors argue that no "fundamental social class" can embody the meaning of the ideological concepts of a "people" or a "nation." Starting from the poststructuralist language theory of Derrida and Foucault, they believe that all ideological elements are connected and function as floating signifiers that can be transformed within discourse through hegemonic practices. The authors give the example of Thatcherism, as an ideology within which signifiers such as "free market", "strong state" and "individual freedom" merged into a single ideology that created a new identity for survivors of Britain's crisis in the 1970s. Political forces that create hegemony also create borders in the discourse between us (insiders) and them (outsiders), thus creating antagonism between the two groups. Antagonism reaches its extremes when outsiders are portrayed as a group that blocks or prevents the realization of an insider's identity. In later books, Laclau uses the deconstructivist approach of Derrida and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis to explore the symbolic order of hegemony and the antagonism that hegemony creates.

Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn"s book Science, Class & Society (1976), shows how the emergence of the science of economics, bourgeois sociology, and historical materialism is inextricably linked to the development of capitalism. Therborn bases his approach on classical historical materialism, but also Althusser's cultural Marxism, and uses his epistemological approach and understanding of science. Therborn opposes sociological explanations based on individual psychology, and the classical economy does just that because it takes free and rational human action as its starting point. He sees the emergence of bourgeois sociology as a consequence of French and other bourgeois revolutions. Those revolutions arose as a consequence of problems and conflicts caused by industrialization and the associated rise of the capitalist class because the new capitalist class clashed with the outmoded political structures of the aristocracy. The intellectual sources of bourgeois sociology are the theory of evolutionary determinism, the theory of elitist voluntarism, and the critique of the previous political economy. The main disadvantage of classical sociology is that it has not made an analytical distinction between society, on the one hand, and man and the state, on the other.

Sociologists such as Durkheim and Max Weber suffered from petty-bourgeois intellectual narrowness and were therefore loyal to capitalism. On the other hand, historical materialism emerged as a scientifically based struggle against the capitalist world. It begins with the publication of the first joint works of Marx and Engels and the book German Ideology (1845), which represents an intellectual encounter between left-Hegelian philosophy, and the idea of the radicalized intelligentsia and the working class. Marx and Engels used the material reality of the real world and the workers' struggle to build a systematic theory of society. That is how they came to the scientific theory of history and the revolutionary strategy based on it.

In his book What Does the Ruling Class do When it Rules?: State Apparatuses and State Power under Feudalism, Capitalism and Socialism (1978), Therborn uses the categories of systems analysis to give a Marxist understanding of state power and the state apparatus. In the process, he constructed a systematic typology of differences between the feudal, capitalist, and socialist states. In the last parts of the book, he studies the history of the strategies that the workers' parties implemented to achieve socialism. In analyzing the strategies that the ruling class pursues in capitalism in order to rule, he concluded that the ruling class uses mostly state apparatus and economic exploitation and domination as ruling strategies, rather than ideology. His next book, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (1980) represents a further development of the ideas of the previous one, and in it, much more attention is paid to the issue of ideology. Therborn understands ideology very broadly, viewing it as an unconscious psychodynamic process that shapes consciousness and gives meaning to individuals and social groups through the symbolic order of language codes.

In the article "Class in the 21st Century" (2012), Therborn studies the history and future of classes and class struggle. He believes that in the first eighty years of the twentieth century, workers were a force that the state and the ruling class had to take into account, either by making concessions to or by strict control over it. The set of processes led to the breakdown of working-class power: liberalization of capital flows, credit expansion, digital trading and accumulation of capital in pension and insurance funds, and global commodity chains - all this led to an enormous concentration of private capital. Instead of nationalization and regulation, the state began to pursue a policy of privatization and liberalization.

Economic differences between countries were greatest at the end of the twentieth century and then began to narrow. That is when the extremely accelerated class stratification began, both in the rich countries and in those countries that were becoming moderately developed (China and India). There is still no organized working class in developing countries (China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Nigeria, and South Africa). The situation is somewhat better in Latin American countries, where workers' parties have their own presidents. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were completely new relations between class and nation, mobilization, identity, and ideology. Economic, gender, and ethnic inequalities remained the same in the twenty-first century as they were in the twentieth century. The ideological and political unification of the middle class with the ordinary masses would make the possibility of forming a class struggle against oligarchic capitalism achievable.

Slovenian sociologist and philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in his works, synthesizes the psychoanalytic approach of Jacques Lacan, postmodernism, and Marxism. He is the author of a large number of books in which he studies classical philosophy, politics, ideology, fascism, totalitarianism, capitalism and consumer culture, popular culture (especially movies), and others. In his book The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), he compares the class struggle with Lacan's concept of the "real." Žižek singles out two mechanisms by which ideology unites the social into a harmonious and coherent totality. Ideology provides unconscious objects in order to nullify the internal contradictions that exist in society. He sees the problems that exist in society as symptoms. These objects serve as symbols that suppress internal social antagonisms. On the other hand, to shape a harmonious image of oneself, ideologies project social problems onto the outside world. Žižek believes that society manages to maintain its own illusion of integrity by creating an ideology, while ideology itself is a mere construct and fantasy. Ideology, as a social fantasy, falsely identifies the object as the culprit, instead of solving the symptom of the problem. In that sense, he cites the Nazi ideology that used the Jews as a scapegoat and blames them for all social problems, that is, the symptoms of social antagonisms.

Authors: Castoriadis Cornelius, Gorz André, Gramsci Antonio, Hirst Paul, Laclau Ernesto, Lefebvre Henri, Mills Charles Wright, Mouffe Chantal, Offe Claus, Piven Francis Fox, Therborn Göran, Žižek Slavoj. Badiou Alain, Beilharz Peter, Hardt Michael, Hindess Barry, Negri Antonio.

Books:

Gorz, André Socialism and Revolution (1975, in French 1967);

- Ecology as Politics (1978, in French 1975);

- Paths to Paradise (1985, in French 1983);

- Critique of Economic Reason (1989, in French 1988);

- Farewell to the Working Class (1997, in French 1980);

Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks (Volumes 1, 2 & 3) (2011, in Italian 1947);

- The Concept of ‘Hegemony’ (2014);

Hirst, Paul. Pre-capitalist Modes of Production (1975);

Laclau, Ernest. Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977);

- Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985);

Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life: The Three-Volume Text (2014, in French 1947, 1961, 1968, 1981);