From §8 of Geoff’s document:
The reflexivity of modernity and the plurality of the institutional dimensions of modernity are, for Giddens, related. Where for Marx, Weber and Durkheim, society could be explained with reference to a single explanatory principle and the dominance of one factor in history and society (the productive forces and capitalism, rationalisation, industrialisation, respectively), Giddens believes that the mono-causality of classical social theory rendered it profoundly reductionist and therefore prone to over-simplification. In opposition to classical social theory, Giddens proposes are four-dimensional, multi-causal model of explanation of the institutional dimensions of modernity. (my italics)
Reading Giddens requires a considerable amount of biting the lip, but I'm afraid I can’t contain myself from challenging this one. Firstly, the conception that Marxism is a social theory is tendentious — Marx was a Communist, rather than a social theorist; secondly, that Marxism is “mono-causal” is a misrepresentation of even some of the most vulgar proponents, let alone “classical” Marxism, presumably that of its founders; thirdly, were it so, it would not be a question of being “prone to over-simplification”, but of being already a breath-taking over-simplification; fourthly, if we were to replace one cause with four causes, we are hardly any better off.
One can only assume that Giddens proposes instead a social theory to better explain history by means of his four causes, and wants to use a straw-man of a mono-causal theory to make it look better.
Now, I accept that “the defence of what Marx really said” is a near-to-useless academic exercise, since the point is only ever to make one’s own critique of existing social conditions, but Giddens’ misrepresentations of Marx are of a piece with the assertion of his own ideology. Further, it is unnecessary to avoid the luxury of using the authoritative words of Marx, where they are useful, in opposition to Giddens.
In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx rejects Hegel’s conception of World History as the exhibition of a single principle. For example:
“Actual extremes cannot be mediated with each other precisely because they are actual extremes. But neither are they in need of mediation, because they are opposed in essence. They have nothing in common with one another; they neither need nor complement one another. The one does not carry in its womb the yearning, the need, the anticipation of the other ...”
Marx does not reject the idea of a “unity of opposites”, but rather regards it as absurdity, Hegel’s insistence on tying up everything, including quite contingent interactions, as the playing out of a single essence.
It would be in the later writings of Engels where we would expect to find the most “deterministic” formulations of Marxism, but in his last years, Engels was saying things like:
“According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.” [Letter to J Bloch, Sept 1890]
and
“What we understand by the economic conditions which we regard as the determining basis of the history of society are the methods by which human beings in a given society produce their means of subsistence and exchange the products among themselves (in so far as division of labour exists). Thus the entire technique of production and transport is here included. According to our conception, this technique also determines the method of exchange and, further, the division of products, and with it, after the dissolution of tribal society, the division into classes also and hence the relations of lordship and servitude and with them the state, politics, law, etc. Under economic conditions are further included the geographical basis on which they operate and those remnants of earlier stages of economic development which have actually been transmitted and have survived — often only through tradition or the force of inertia; also of course the external milieu which surrounds this form of society.” [Letter to Starkenburg, January 1894 — and the letter goes on to continually widen the definition]
All of which is only to say that from the beginning to the end of their lives Marx and Engels were battling against this kind of “reductionism” and “oversimplification”.
But listen to Marx’s summation of modernity written 150 years ago:
“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
“The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
“The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation. ...
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
“The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.” [Communist Manifesto]
Now personally, I think one has to give Marx credit for the fact that this very explicit statement of the specific character of the epoch and the general course of the development of the history of our time has proved stunningly accurate across a very long period of time. Of course, the whole nature of the political landscape has changed, many times over since 1848, but these statements remain as true as they ever were, but more so.
Further, this passage as well as any other demonstrates how Marx indeed relies on a single principle (namely the commodity relation) to perceive a dominant tendency in the development of world history, namely that this relation tends to grow and penetrate deeper into all human relations and extend its scope across the globe.
But does this constitute a “mono-causal theory of history"? No, it doesn’t. Whenever Marx is weighing up the prognosis of social events of his time, he is extremely eclectic, and gives considerable priority to factors like the psychological state of the social strata involved, geography, the condition of their leadership and even the role of social theory as a component factor.
The point that Marx is making in the above-quoted passage in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is that the “unity of opposites” arises from the abstraction of different aspects of a single existence, whereas two entities may simply be opposed and foreign to one another in their existence, and their mediation can only be made by an act of abstraction. On the other hand, at a given stage in history social entities may be foreign to one another, but the very fact of their material interconnection and conflict brings them into relation with one another. World history it is said is not given but a creation of the bourgeois mode of production, of the dynamic of development of commodity production.
Consequently, it is quite valid for Giddens to identify four (or five or six ...) “causes” in contemporary modern society and consider the interaction of these four centres as independent forces in society, but the result can be nothing more than a kind of mechanism of the same kind as the “models” of the economists who plug 2,500 “independent variables” into their equations. Such theories can be quite powerful just so long as no new factors enter the equation.
So, if Giddens makes claim to be a sociologist of modernity, or at least of the current period, then nothing of the above should undermine his claim. However, none of the factors in his “model” — industry, state monopoly of violence, state surveillance and the market — show any sign of transformation: There Is No Alternative in every case.
On the other hand, any attempt to predict the next turn in politics by reference to the Communist Manifesto would be about as likely to succeed as the innumerable attempts to predict the next turn in the world economy from a reading of Das Kapital — not likely.
All that said, though we communists fight for the overthrow of capitalism, and this project legitimately conditions our concept of history — whether or not its downfall is the next thing on the agenda, we certainly need to know the terrain on which we are fighting, and we need to be able recognise the changes taking place.
Since the end of World War Two we have seen a series of social movements whose line of development is continuous:
From the point of view of causes, these movements are very complex: for example, the rise of the national liberation movements derived both from the weakness of the old colonial powers in the aftermath of the War, the support of the now-enlarged Soviet Bloc and the revolution led by the Chinese Communist Party, the policy of American “neo-colonialism”, in combination with the strength of the workers’ movement in the West and the rising demand for commodities as the post-war boom exhausted itself.
The Civil Rights movement drew strength from the strength of organised labour in the U.S. as much as it drew inspiration from the national liberation movement; the women’s liberation movement certainly had its roots in the changes in the labour process and the requirement for female labour, and equally in the expansion of trade offered by the commodification of domestic labour, but the women’s struggle drew its fighting strength from the civil rights movement and the peace movement each in turn deriving force from the overtly anti-imperialist national liberation movements and the workers’ states — all of these processes were definitively played out on a world stage and were profoundly “multi-causal” if one could admit of any such an absurd conception.
The other significant movement of this period which could be mentioned are the post-War Stalinist overturns, which are now definitively terminated. The collapse of Stalinism in the USSR and Eastern Europe ended an heroic resistance, founded on the Russian Revolution, to the march of capital. From a causal point of view this process is extremely complex, but the outcome is of a piece with those mentioned above and brilliantly described (though certainly not predicted) by Marx and Engels in 1848.
No wonder some people think that it is better to fight against non-class oppression and want to dump the class struggle!! and it would be easy to draw the conclusion that There Is No Alternative!
So, to the political terrain.
There is a certain logic in the succession of social movements from the Civil Rights Movement to the Women’s Movement to the plethora of identity politics movements. There can be no doubt that these movements are emancipatory and could not be bypassed by socialism. At the same time, the fragmentary logic of the progression is also very clear. In hindsight, we have to ask whether the working class movements of the past were in some sense based upon the exercise traditional forms of personal oppression?
Another observation: the concept of socialism, despite Marx and Engels, has been dominated by an oppressive kind of collectivism exemplified in centralised state economic planning and, in its most obscene expressions, by bureaucratic repression, messianism and rigid conformism.
Surely the movements of the post-world war two period have definitively destroyed this concept of socialism, but equally well they have laid the basis for a concept of socialism which is founded on the kind of free association envisaged by Marx and Engels.
None of the liberation projects of the past fifty years are complete, but I don’t think identity politics can go any further. The young radicals of the “anti-capitalist movement” are saying “Because I'm an X (or a Y or a Z ...), I'm against capitalism (meaning big capital)”.
A word about collectivism: the more we have become fragmented as individual citizens the more we have become dominated by our collective labour, and the less independent and self-sufficient we have become. Whatever the claims of post-modern social theory about the fragmentary nature of consciousness and the discontinuity of relations, the very basis of the post-modern condition is the unprecedented unification of humankind in a single world market, by money.
So the price of freedom from oppression by other people is the deepening and consolidation of our oppression by the inhuman power of money.
I agree with Geoff’s assertion that we are entering the period of ethical politics, but to tell the truth, I can only marshal a number of weak arguments in support. The complexity of modern society can be taken to mean that the capacity to control political and economic events by scientific, i.e., knowledge-based means, is attenuating. It seems to me that whether you are running a large capitalist enterprise of managing the political affairs of a nation-state, direction, compulsion and manipulation are means of ever-decreasing effectiveness. The Unhappy Consciousness. It is necessary to make an ethical appeal to the population, to mobilise the mass of the people to act as good economic agents: that is, to adhere to relations of exchange: “no authority without democracy”, “no rights without responsibility”, etc. On the basis of this ethic of course, those who have won a democratic election exercise the righteousness of the just, and those who hold responsible jobs have plenty of rights, just as the rich have the right to spend. The customer is always right — for the right price I'll murder your wife, but if you like your tea with arsenic, be my guest. Money has no smell.
But I do think that ethical politics is an excellent ground on which to fight capitalism. The historical role of the bourgeoisie is not an ethical one; the historical mission of the bourgeoisie is to resolve the question of knowledge: Galileo, Bacon and Descartes have as much a claim as pioneers of the bourgeois revolution as Cromwell and Luther; the historical mission of capital is to destroy the ethics of duty which characterises all traditional relations; it is actually a faux pas, socially unacceptable, to expect virtue; the scepticism of our age recognises only what pays: crime doesn’t pay, so what pays is not a crime.
The historical role of the proletariat is an ethical one; ethical politics is the ground on which even the most uneducated has equal say with the most erudite and politically-correct wordsmith and cunning huckster. While it is often a point of frustration that mainstream political debate cannot seem to get out of the mire of mutual accusations of corruption and skull-duggery, it is a fact that bourgeois politics is inherently corrupt.
But the ethical challenge is a formidable one nonetheless: the idea that one ought to give something in return for what you receive, that good conduct should be rewarded, that virtue is a private matter, that all relationships are subject to negotiation, that the greatest good for the greatest number is the goal of social policy — these are appealing ideas. Yet they are the foundation of Utilitarianism, bourgeois political economy.
And yet the Green movement, for example, has already pioneered contrary principles with considerable success.
Giddens’ ethics is hypocritical: “No rights without responsibility” has qualitatively different implications for a welfare claimant or a wealthy speculator; this is simply because the ethical issue is posed as one of exchange, and the poor person simply doesn’t have anything to offer in exchange for their rights. “No authority without democracy” — except of course for people with money who exercise authority in direct proportion to their wealth. “Equality as inclusion” — this is a kind of paternalism because “inclusion” excludes “rejectionism”.
Andy