Heinrich on Marx
[”Angelus Novus” asked me to post this link]
Reading
– A Critical Engagement with Karl Heinz Roth and others”
Michael Heinrich
[The following text is the slightly reworked version of an article
which appeared on 21 September 2005 in Jungle World, a leftist German
weekly newspaper. In a previous issue, Karl Heinz Roth, one of the
main German representatives of Operaismo, had argued that some
important Marxian categories are not able to grasp contemporary
capitalism. The text at hand answers this critique, stressing the
difference between Marxian theory and traditional Marxism,
emphasizing the “new reading of Marx”, which developed through the
last decades. The German text can be found at the website of the
author: here]
In the past 120 years, Marx has been read and understood in widely
varying ways. In the Social Democratic and Communist worker’s
movement, Marx was viewed as the great Economist, who proved the
exploitation of the workers, the unavoidable collapse of capitalism,
and the inevitability of proletarian revolution. This sort of
“Marxist political economy” was embedded in a Marxist worldview
(Weltanschauung) which provided answers for all pre-existing
historical, social, and philosophical questions.
This omniscient Marxism was analytically useless, but was eminently
well-suited as a means of propaganda and as an instrument of
authority against those who questioned the party line. Already in the
1920s and 1930s, a Left critique of such Marxism emerged, but was
nonetheless choked off by Stalinism and Fascism and did not receive a
hearing in the Cold War era. This situation began to change in the
1960s, as Marx was read anew during the rise of the student movement
and protests against the Vietnam War. A New Left arose beyond the
classical worker’s movement which saw itself positioned on two
fronts: on the one hand against the global capitalist system, on the
other hand against an authoritarian and dogmatically petrified
Communist movement, which was viewed as a force propping up domination.
This new Left was anything but unified. As regards the critique of
Marxist orthodoxy, one can distinguish, to strongly simplify, between
two major directions. One tendency criticized the trade unions and
left political parties for viewing the workers as an object to be
managed and not as a subject capable of struggle and resistance. The
theoretical foundations of this controlling, dominating relationship
to the working class were located in the objectivism and economism of
traditional Marxism. Class struggle, as opposed to objective economic
laws, was emphasized as the decisive motor of societal development.
August 1st, 2006 at 1:22 am
And the point is … ? This is a recurrent theme repeated by the petit-bourgeois left even in Marx’s time. Marx got it wrong … things have happened he never mentioned or expected … his predictions didn’t work out … his followers did horrible things … he was a materialist and an economic determinist. Marxism is never quite good enough and needs to be improved. And always he has to be saved from himself. We all would like a kinder, gentler Marxism, where no-one gets hurt and the petit-bourgeoisie not the workers get to decide everything, where no difficult decisions have to be made, mistakes never happen and everyone lives happily ever after. But then it wouldn’t be Marxism. Marxism: Love it or Leave it.
“Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. It is the conviction, moreover, that all attempts to surpass or ‘improve’ it have led and must lead to over-simplification, triviality and eclecticism.” Lukacs