Marxism vs. Anti-Marxist “Marxism”

The War Against Marxism, Reification and Revolution, Tony McKenna, Bloomsbury 2021-

The Emperor has no clothes! The “Marxists” have no Marxism! This is a beautiful polemic against the Frankfurt School , Critical Theory and many of the most prominent left academics. It is hard hitting and a good antidote to people getting sucked into anti-Marxism via “Marxism”.

The social/economic origin of these anti-Marxist “Marxist” trends is the defeat of the workers’ movement , the “Midnight in the Century”( Serge) that gave rise to Stalinism and Fascism. These intellectuals were anti-Fascist and wanted a radical critique of capitalism. They turned to the phrasing of Marxism to express this but then gave into pessimism. The result was a “Marxism” denuded of class agency, class struggle, the revolutionary goal and often dialectics. This process was replicated with Post-Modernism , Post-Marxism and anti-Marxist “Marxism” in the 1980s and onward, also a period of downturn in class struggle.

McKenna also savagely attacks the willful obscurity and convoluted nature of the writing of these anti-Marxist “Marxists”. He says there are several causes of this. Part of it is related to their elitism. If they write in obscure language, the impression is that this must be deep intellectual stuff. If readers can’t understand it, it must be because they are just not smart enough. This raises the prestige of the author as a super-intellectual. The other side of this is that if stated in plain English, the response would often be “Yah, so — that’s obvious “ etc. Also, the obscurity allows them to ditch Marxism claiming that they are not. As Mckenna puts it:

“Perhaps when you know yourself to be an important intellectual Figure writing important intellectual Things you are free from the banal need to actually have people understand you. Indeed the very opaqueness , self-contradiction and obscurity of your work are surely a sign of its profundity…the fact that only a tiny elite of the most gifted and precocious readers will be able to scale its dizzy heights. But of course , this type of thing has little connection to Marxism..”(208)

Academic Marxism allows both the writers and the readers to abstain from struggle and retreat into esoteric academic discussions with little relevance to real world organizing.

One of the main dangers of this trend is that it can turn people away from real Marxism. Ordinary people who try to engage with these theorists can come away thinking they are too stupid or un-educated to be Marxists. Those who do continue to engage can become educated , pessimistic abstentionists rather than Marxist activists.

The process that McKenna uses to describe this process is “reification”, turning people , processes etc. into static things. This process often freezes the dialectic into a static set of terms rather than a dynamic process:

“ …the transfiguration of living social relationships into “things”…they( anti-Marxist authors) transform , social, class-rooted categories of exploitation which evolve out of a living history into transhistorical “things” . The theorist in question will often replace class as the driving force of development with some ahistorical abstraction“ (pg 11)

Examples McKenna gives are Althuser’s “ideology” and Mouffe and Laclau’s “field of discoursivity”. This mechanical materialism is often supplemented by philosophical idealism (214)

One aspect of this is the subject-object problem in philosophy. Kant expressed the unknowability of the object. This fit well with bourgeois ideas. The capitalist class claims to produce value. Yet it only expropriates value produced by workers. The bourgeois viewpoint is naturally separated from the object of production, the proletariat. On the other hand the proletariat is both the object and the subject of production. It can overcome the object/subject dichotomy by taking control of the means of production.

“ For the bourgeoisie the subject-object distinction will always remain untraversable , for subject and object are antipodes. For the proletariat , however, the object is ,on the most fundamental level, identical with the subject.”(216)

In practical terms , Marxists have seen the proletariat as the potentially revolutionary class because it produces the wealth of capitalism but is exploited. It has both the potential power and interest in overthrowing capitalism. It is a collective class that can only rule collectively and thus democratically. McKenna’s analysis follows Marx in seeing the proletariat as the class that can also overcome the philosophical dilemma of subject and object, by becoming the full subject of production and overcoming its position as mere object. This is an important clarification of our understanding of the revolutionary potential of the proletariat.

Mckenna clearly expresses this connection of philosophy to political strategy:

“ For Marx , the culmination of the history of philosophy and the development of the proletariat as a social power are not to be understood as discrete and exclusive events. This is what the unity of theory and practice signifies;”(93)

An opening chapter discusses the Frankfurt School’s elitism in blaming mass production for undermining cultural values. The problem for these theorists is not capitalist impact on culture but mass culture in general:

“ The simultaneous contemplation of paintings by a large public…is an early symbol of the crisis of painting” ( Walter Benjamin pg. 17)

This of course is precisely the opposite of the practice of Marxists when they led the working class to power. One of the key achievements of the Bolshevik Revolution was that the masses were finally able to enjoy the fruits of culture previously reserved to the upper classes. They opened museums, plays , opera, ballet etc. to ordinary people for free. Large numbers took advantage of this opening.

These writers see false consciousness, ideology as “ part of what it means to be “the collective”. It is not mostly ruling class trickery , but just the existence of the mass that creates the problem. McKenna says that these authors believe that “ only those intellectuals who stand outside the masses, who — by virtue of their own intellectual virtuosity can be the ones who see past the “false consciousness” ( pg 26). Instead of the less but still elitist version that the intellectuals have the truth and they must enlighten the masses, here the intellectuals keep their esoteric truth that the masses can never aspire to.

McKenna explains this Frankfurt school position clearly and how it expresses reification:

“…Benjamin, Adorno and so on…begin from the “thing”, the fact of mass production , on this account , comes into being as a fully formed and independent thing which generates the supine and uncritical “mass consumer” and “mass audience”; the social consciousness of the masses is not therefore, tied into the relationship of exploitation…but is simply the passive , inevitable and inescapable reflection of the thing, i.e. of mass production itself.”(34)

McKenna doesn’t say so directly but this elitist philosophy is literally reactionary: Culture was less debased when it was monopolized by the elite. If the mass consumer and the mass audience is the problem in and of itself, we must instead oppose not mass capitalist consumerism but the mass itself. Political conclusion is to go back to a time before massification.

“ On the cultural level , they lament the fact that the masses have increased influence , and at the level of economics the same is true, they rue the level of purchasing power the masses have achieved as consumers”(56)

Instead of supporting the interests of the working class , the anti-Marxist “Marxist” philosophy seems to oppose increases in working class living standards

This description of the Frankfurt School also shows its downplaying of dialectics. Working class consciousness is actually a result of social being as Marx said. Social being is contradictory. It contains different strands and influences and changes over time. Fundamentally it is composed of the need to obey capitalism and compete with other workers to survive. However , it also includes opposition to and dissatisfaction with exploitation and oppression. This has resulted in class struggle being a permanent feature of class society.

“ exploitation.. must appear to the worker as decisive , qualitative categories of (her) whole physical ,mental and moral existence.” (32)

Fundamental pessimism must exclude the potential of class struggle and certainly working class revolution. As such it must exclude or at least downplay dialectics. Pessimism for the anti-Marxists likely came before the elitist philosophical deviations from Marxism, but each reinforces the other. The anti-Marxist “Marxism” is an expression of the social being of the isolated academic philosopher contemplating the decline in class struggle and revolutionary working class movements.

Though it claims to be anti-capitalist, it lets capitalism off the hook by blaming mass production in general. Correcting this, McKenna says:

“ exploitation ..is not the product of a generic something called “mass consumption” which stands in a necessary connection to “global poverty ; rather global poverty is the product of a particular set of class relationships..”(55)

Herbert Marcuse, who was a favorite of 60s radicals is not much treated in this volume, though he is mentioned in passing. Marcuse falls well in the framework of the pessimism of the Frankfurt School. He decried the “One-Dimensional” society based on massification. He saw this as the loss of any fundamental critique.

The reification of the Frankfurt School results in a misunderstanding of oppression as well:

“.oppression becomes something which results from the interaction between two given and ahistorical things.i.e. a nature which is inherently unknowable-…and a generic humanity whole reason is inherently defective precisely because it cannot come to terms with its natural object.”

Besides these issues, McKenna gives a couple excellent examples of Marxist literary criticism and criticizes the anti-Marxist nature of what passes for Marxist literary criticism. He analyzes the misuse of Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci to make him a prop of reformism. The author also engages in a vigorous defense of the polemic.

Why does Anti-Marxist “ Marxism” matter? Why write a book devoted to it? Marxism is engaged in the battle of ideas. Human beings are creatures of language. Almost all action is organized with words. The philosophy of Academe spreads out and influences the ideas of activists and organized socialists. Different analyses have different consequences in action. Anti-Marxist “Marxism” is perhaps the most insidious attack on Marxism of all. As McKenna says of one of these writers:

“ It represents nothing more than a form of the most virulent anti-Marxism. But it is being packaged and sold in the language of Marxism itself.”(219)

“ a counterrevolution can also involve a backlash in thought. It can involve the attempt to break down, delegitimize or neuter the most revolutionary forms of ideology..to assimilate them to the interests of the powers that be.”(236)

Resisting this ideological counterrevolution is part of the process of building a clear and viable Marxist movement. Obviously, as humanity faces numerous serious threats from capitalism, the need for such a movement has never been more imperative. This book is an excellent weapon in the fight against the ideological counterrevolution and the re-establishment of Marxism!