Philosophy After Marx: 100 Years of Misreadings and the Normative Turn in Political Philosophy 9004224270, 9789004224278

Citation preview

Philosophy after Marx

Historical Materialism Book Series Editorial Board

Sébastien Budgen, Paris – Steve Edwards, London Marcel van der Linden, Amsterdam – Peter Thomas, London

VOLUME 65

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm

Philosophy after Marx 100 Years of Misreadings and the Normative Turn in Political Philosophy By

Christoph Henning Translated by

Max Henninger

Leiden • boston 2014

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association), as well as by the Emil Zaugg-Fonds of the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Copyright 2005 Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld (German edition). Translated from German “Philosophie nach Marx. 100 Jahre Marxrezeption und die normative Sozialphilosophie der Gegenwart in der Kritik”. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Henning, Christoph, 1973–  [Philosophie nach Marx. English]  Philosophy after Marx : 100 years of misreadings and the normative turn in political philosophy / by Christoph Henning ; translated by Max Henninger.   pages cm. — (Historical materialism, ISSN 1570-1522 ; VOLUME 65)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-90-04-22427-8 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-27033-6 (e-book : alk. paper) 1. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. 2. Philosophy, Modern. 3. Social sciences—Philosophy—History. I. Title.  B3305.M74H33613 2014  193—dc23

2014001330

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1570-1522 ISBN 978-90-04-22427-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-27033-6 (e-book) Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents

‘Sandblasting Marx’ – A Review by Fredric Jameson .....................................................

ix

1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1.1 The problem .............................................................................................................. 1.2 Retaining Marx? A preliminary account of his theory ................................ 1.3 The lacuna in contemporary social theory ..................................................... 1.4 On the method employed in this study ........................................................... 1.4.1 The choice to work with texts only ..................................................... 1.4.2 The focus on German-language texts ................................................. 1.5 The structure of the study ....................................................................................

1 1 4 8 10 10 11 13

2 Marx Yesterday: A Genealogy of Misconceptions .................................................... 2.1 Marx in the theory of Social Democracy ......................................................... 2.1.1 The Erfurt Programme ............................................................................. 2.1.2 Revisionism ................................................................................................. 2.1.3 Neo-Kantianism: a fortunate coincidence ......................................... 2.1.4 Orthodoxy .................................................................................................... 2.1.5 Key elements of Marxian theory I: the schemes of reproduction .... 2.1.6 Key elements of Marxian theory II: the falling rate of profit ............. 2.2 Marx in the theory of communism .................................................................... 2.2.1 The role of violence .................................................................................. 2.2.2 The organisation of the party ................................................................ 2.2.3 The dictatorship of the proletariat ...................................................... 2.2.4 A creative evolution of Marxism? ........................................................ 2.2.5 Trotskyism – a lesser evil? ...................................................................... 2.2.6 Key elements of Marxian theory III: imperialism ...............................

17 21 21 30 39 42 50 67 78 79 85 89 95 102 104

vi • Contents

2.3 Marx in economic theory ..................................................................................... 2.3.1 Marx between economic paradigms ................................................... 2.3.2 Neoclassical refutations of Marx .......................................................... 2.3.3 Adoption of the neoclassical approach by Marxists ...................... 2.3.4 Diffusion of the paradigm into neighbouring sciences ................. 2.3.5 Key elements of Marxian theory IV: the theory of money ................ 2.4 Marx in (German) sociology ................................................................................ 2.4.1 The division of the world into norm-free functions and normative frames ...................................................................................... 2.4.2 Whence the predominance of the neoclassical approach in sociology? ................................................................................................ 2.4.3 Normativity as a placeholder for incomplete worldviews ............ 2.4.4 The flaws are projected onto the symbolic figure Marx ............... 2.4.5 Critique of the technocracy-hypothesis and of industrial sociology ....................................................................................................... 2.4.6 The sociological approach to social classes ...................................... Key elements of Marxian theory V: classes .......................................... Classes (and more) in Max Weber ....................................................... Classes in Helmut Schelsky .................................................................... Classes in Luhmann .................................................................................. 2.5 ‘From Marx to Heidegger’: Social Philosophy ................................................. 2.5.1 A categorisation attempt by René König ........................................... 2.5.2 Confronting the philosophical history of idealism ......................... The influence of Fichte ............................................................................ The influence of Nietzsche ..................................................................... The influence of Hegel ............................................................................. Vitalism and the philosophy of Weltanschauung ............................ 2.5.3 Rudolf Eucken as precursor ................................................................... 2.5.4 Georg Lukács as mediator ...................................................................... 2.5.5 Martin Heidegger as offshoot ................................................................ Heidegger and Marx ................................................................................. Heidegger and nihilism ........................................................................... 2.5.6 Niklas Luhmann’s philosophy of systems .......................................... 2.5.7 Key elements of Marxian theory VI: Marx and Hegel ...................... Marx as a critic of Hegel ......................................................................... Hegelian Marxism: semantic displacements .................................... 2.6 Critical theory or the dissolution of critique in religion ............................. 2.6.1 Horkheimer’s vitalism .............................................................................. 2.6.2 Pollock’s hermetic analysis of state capitalism ................................ 2.6.3 Adorno’s quietist utopianism ................................................................

121 121 131 143 158 160 181 184 191 194 201 205 214 215 220 227 236 242 244 249 249 253 255 258 267 277 294 295 304 313 319 320 327 335 336 341 347



2.6.4 2.6.5 2.6.6 2.6.7

Contents • vii

Key elements of Marxian theory VII: Marx’s critique of religion .......................................................................................................... The critique of religion as a political issue ....................................... Four theological views of Marx ............................................................. Rejection of ‘atheism’ ............................................................................... Tolerance in spite of ‘atheism’ .............................................................. Religious socialism .................................................................................... Excursus: critique of the theory of secularisation ........................... The separation of religion and politics ............................................... Walter Benjamin’s political theology ..................................................

3 Marx Today: Critique of Contemporary Philosophy ............................................... 3.1 Jürgen Habermas or the return of the philosophy of law .......................... 3.1.1 Anthropological beginnings ................................................................... 3.1.2 Transformation into rationality types ................................................. 3.1.3 The myth of ‘normative foundations’ ................................................. 3.1.4 Key elements of Marxian theory VIII: Marx and ethics ................... 3.1.5 Procedural structures ............................................................................... 3.1.6 Key elements of Marxian theory IX: Marx and law .......................... 3.2 John Rawls or the apotheosis of ignorance ..................................................... 3.2.1 John Rawls as a neoclassical theorist .................................................. 3.2.2 Justifying Stakhanov ................................................................................. 3.2.3 The communitarian response ............................................................... 3.2.4 Responses within post-1989 German philosophy ............................ Otfried Höffe ............................................................................................... Wolfgang Kersting ..................................................................................... Axel Honneth ............................................................................................. 3.3 Business ethics: a ‘normatively substantial’ social theory? ........................ 3.3.1 Reasons for the rise of this discipline ................................................. 3.3.2 Theological business ethics .................................................................... 3.3.3 Managerial business ethics ..................................................................... 3.3.4 Historicist business ethics ...................................................................... 3.3.5 The Hegelianism of business ethics ..................................................... 3.3.6 The critique of globalisation as a placeholder ................................. 3.4 Neo-pragmatism or the persistence of Hegel ................................................. 3.4.1 The German reception of pragmatism as the index of a problem ........................................................................................................ 3.4.2 A transformation of German idealism? .............................................. 3.4.3 Neo-pragmatism and Marxism as hostile brothers ......................... 3.4.4 The conservation of rationality and normativity in Marx ............

353 364 367 367 369 371 375 388 391 403 406 408 413 416 422 430 446 453 454 461 463 472 473 475 476 482 482 485 492 500 507 510 513 514 518 525 530

viii • Contents

4 Conclusion: What Philosophy after Marx? ................................................................. 4.1 The reality check as a philosophical litmus test ........................................... 4.2 Topology of social philosophy ............................................................................. 4.2.1 Kant’s philosophical topology ............................................................... 4.2.2 The overcoming of dualism in Hegel .................................................. 4.2.3 The transformation of (Hegelian) philosophy in Marx ................. 4.2.4 The transformation of (Hegelian) philosophy in pragmatism ..... 4.2.5 Supernormativism: Philosophy twice transformed ........................ 4.3 The function and scope of theory after Marx ................................................ 4.3.1 The avoidance of theory in critiques of Marx .................................. 4.3.2 Marx’s theory is not a determinism .................................................... 4.3.3 Marx’s topic is civil society .................................................................... 4.3.4 Neoclassical redeployments within economic theory ................... 4.3.5 The side-play of dialectics as discursive displacement ................. 4.3.6 The task of a critique of normative social philosophy .................. 4.4 Normative theory: ethics as a surrogate for explanation ............................

535 536 541 541 542 543 546 547 549 550 551 552 553 554 555 557

Afterword to the English Translation .................................................................................. References .................................................................................................................................... Person Index ................................................................................................................................

563 565 657

Sandblasting Marx

By Fredric Jameson. This review of the German original of the present volume appeared in New Left Review, II/55. A Marx revival seems to be under way, predating the current disarray on Wall Street, even though no clear-cut political options yet seem to propose themselves. Sensible opportunists have welcomed any sign of sympathy for Marxian positions, without wanting to alienate the new converts (or returning fellow-travellers). The big ideological issues – anarchism, the party, economic planning, social classes – are still mainly avoided, on the grounds that they remind too many people of Communist propaganda. Such a reminder is unwanted, not so much because it is accompanied by the memory of deaths and violence (memory is fragile in postmodernity) as simply and less dramatically because such topics now appear boring. On the face of it, then, it does not seem plausible to welcome a book which, somewhat in the Althusserian vein of yesteryear, implacably denounces the idealistic deviations and doctrinal errors, the ideological misappropriations and misguided revisions of thinkers widely supposed to have some Marxian pedigree or relevance for younger would-be Marxists today. Christoph Henning’s Philosophie nach Marx is a comprehensive, six-hundred page indictment of everyone from Kautsky to present-day left liberals of Habermasian or Rawlsian stripe, and it is well worth standing up to its innumerable provocations. It is a tireless catalogue of what I will call Marx-avoidance, which for all its unremitting zeal remains oddly non-partisan. Henning does not seem to speak from any easily identifiable political or ideological position, although his philosophical bias would seem to be a kind of Wittgensteinian Kantianism, appropriate enough for this intellectual operation. The reader needs to be warned, however, that the word ‘theory’, now generally taken, at least in the West, to signify post-structuralism or Frankfurt School Hegelianism and quizzed for its exhaustion or demise, or attacked for its perniciously elitist abstraction, is used quite differently here, as a term for Marx’s work itself, whose object according to Henning was bürgerliche Gesellschaft – by which he means not civil society (that fatigued war-horse to which left liberals and radical democrats alike still appeal), but rather capitalism as such: a system to be confronted in its totality, rather than from any purely

x • Sandblasting Marx

political or philosophical, or even from any narrowly economic, perspective. Henning’s emphasis, however, remains focused on Marx’s work itself, whose ‘content and character have rarely been adequately grasped either by its enemies or its defenders’. This perspective will occasionally remind us of Horkheimer’s plaintive confession: ‘I pledge allegiance to critical theory; that means that I can tell what is false, but cannot define what is correct’. But such frankness, hoping to convert seeming weakness into aggressive counter-attack, does not exempt the Frankfurt School from the force of Henning’s critical juggernaut; on the contrary, it will become one of its principal targets. Henning’s critical panorama divides into two unequal segments: the first covers the fate of ‘Marxism’ or Marxist theory from the death of Marx to the October Revolution. This is familiar ground, but Henning’s analysis of the respective shortcomings of socialdemocratic and communist theory has interesting new things to tell us. The second and longer part of Philosophie nach Marx sets out from the ‘social philosophy’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and brings us up to the present, with a wideangle view of its successors today, where Henning distinguishes four dominant schools: Habermas, Rawls, normative ‘economic ethics’ and neo-pragmatism. But although his review of all this is roughly chronological, it avoids any purely historical account by organising its material around nine systematic Kernpunkte or ‘key points’ – an awkward formula which might better have been rendered as Althusserian problématiques, or versions of the medieval ‘crux’ around which debates traditionally revolved, pressing on an un­resolved conceptual dilemma. This is an excellent framework, but before we outline it, the limits of Henning’s enterprise need to be indicated. For one thing, the social philosophy canvassed in its second part is, with the exception of Rawls, exclusively German. It is true, of course, that the only foreign intellectual scene with which English-speaking intellectuals are generally familiar, in its broad outlines and principal players, is French. The richness of Italian or German intellectual life is mostly a closed book to them, with the exception of a few well-known stars, who collaborate with such provincialism by re­orienting their footnotes and references around an Anglophone sociology or philosophy that has become hegemonic. Here the theoretically minded reader will miss discussions of Foucault and Derrida, Deleuze and Badiou, Agamben and Negri, Rorty and Giddens. This is a matter for regret, since it would have been good to have a review of these thinkers in the Henning manner, which, however truly damaging or unremittingly negative, is never basely partisan in the fashion of Althusserian denunciations of old (or even of the perhaps still related anti-theoretical inquisitions and denunciations of the present). Particularly in the area of sociology, on the other hand, the English-language reader will discover unfamiliar references: the philosopher Rudolf Eucken (1846–1926), for example, or René Koenig (1906–92), founder of the Cologne school of sociology, whose critique of sociological discourse is fundamental for Henning. But they will readily imagine their own equivalents, for the debates are everywhere analogous. (One could think



Sandblasting Marx • xi

of such transpositions as a literary historian might of the unfamiliar formal patterns of a history of music or the visual arts, whose very non-translatability may yield insight into the dynamics of comparable but dissimilar historical processes.) In any case the names of Kautsky and Habermas, or Heidegger and Horkheimer, are central enough in the history of ideas to warrant attention in their own contexts, however local these may seem to a parochially Anglophone ‘West’. Henning’s handling of the concept of social philosophy also needs a gloss. It includes everything from straightforward political and economic manifestos of the early years of revolutionary or parliamentary Marxism, through the sociology of Weber and Luhmann, all the way to outright (or ‘pure’) philosophy, in Heidegger and Adorno, since the latter is as implicitly political and social as the former is philosophical. Indeed the book’s basic argument is that social and political analyses have been sapped and vitiated by their ‘ontologisation’, that is to say, by their translation and above all sublimation into purely philosophical arguments and issues. This is Henning’s version of the more frequent and vulgar reproach of ‘idealism’, which has become something of a ritual insult. Henning does seem to have a philosophical basis for his own bias against philosophy; it is, as has been suggested, a discreet Wittgensteinian Kantianism. In short, the corpus will consist of the social sciences, as they impinge on philosophy (or at least on thought), and philosophy and its contemporary acolyte theories, as these encroach on the social sciences. If the latter seem to have a pronouncedly philosophical cast, is this to be attributed to German intellectual traditions antithetical to either British empiricism or a younger American pragmatism? If so, that would be yet another reason to work through these unfamiliar German materials. To be sure, social philosophy is a latecomer – sociology itself only really emerges as a discipline at the very end of the nineteenth century, with Weber and Durkheim. There will therefore be a welcome and extended prologue dealing with the more overt fortunes of Marxism itself, in social democracy, communism and Marxist economics, before we reach ‘bourgeois’ developments. Henning’s non-partisan but implacable critique of Marxism’s own native traditions (no one is spared) gives his book a breadth and variety of targets that mark it out as far more ambitious than any of the usual polemics. We may now outline an inventory of his Kernpunkte, organised by roman numerals. Unsurprisingly, the immediate debates in the first heyday of social democracy turned on social reproduction (i) and the falling rate of profit (ii). That both issues are still with us in the age of globalisation should be plain, but can be documented by the frequency and intensity of the word ‘crisis’, in all its various meanings, in every kind of public discourse today, in which Marx is ‘repressed’ by a naturalisation of the business cycles that ‘ontologises’ them, to use Henning’s language (I would rather say it flattens them out, dedialecticises them, and turns them into non-dialectical ‘laws’ or regularities). The notion of a ‘falling rate of profit’, meanwhile, leads to standard denunciations of Marx’s distinction between price and value, and an excuse to leave Marxist economics behind forever.

xii • Sandblasting Marx

With Bolshevism the centre of gravity moves towards politics as such, which means that the third nodal point or crux will centre on the theory of imperialism (iii), involving not merely the arc from Soviet foreign policy to theories of globalisation, but also Lenin’s and Hilferding’s discussions of finance capital. The more purely political emphasis of Lenin and Stalin ‘de-economises and re-ideologises’ Marx’s original problematic (Trotsky and Mao are given short shrift). Thus abandoned to the professional economists, Marx is ready for burial at the hands of pre- and post-Marxist economists alike – from Smith to Keynes and Friedman, many a nominally Marxist economist covertly endorsing some of these non-Marxian paradigms. Here the crucial nodal point (iv) is the theory of money itself, which takes us back again to the opening chapters of Capital; while the accompanying non-Marxist developments in sociology founder, in all their variety of thematics – from Weber to Luhmann – on the fundamental crux of social classes (v). With these now classical moves and positions established, the reader has been prepared to confront the seemingly more modern, or at least twentieth-century, developments that start with the name of Martin Heidegger. The second part of the book will be accompanied by new Kernpunkte: vi, Hegel and Marx; vii, Marx’s Critique of Religion; viii, Marx and Ethics; and ix, Marx and Law. But they will also be organised in a supplementary fashion around theses proposed by René Koenig that reinforce the ‘antiphilosophical’ bias of Henning’s approach to his more modern texts. Koenig’s eight theses are summarised as follows: (i) social philosophy is an alienating reaction against Marxism; (ii) as a reaction, it remains thereby secretly bound to Marxism; (iii) its origins lie in a Hegelian dialectic shorn of its negativity; (iv) it transforms an idealist philosophy of identity into an existential one; (v) it short-circuits historical origins into modes of being, and thinking into Being; (vi) it problematises theory in toto, generating a crisis in philosophy; (vii) a loss of objectivity and scientificity ensues; and (viii) in their place comes an empty ‘politics’ of identity and self-affirmation. This last displacement can also be characterised as decisionism, fundamental to all forms of existentialism, and attributable to Fichte, who becomes the true villain of the story, rather than Hegel. In this tale of decline and fall, Heidegger occupies a privileged position by reason of the crucial role played in it by Henning’s term ‘ontologisation’, by which we may take him to mean, simply, turning a problem or a theory into philosophy; or perhaps one should say, a philo­sophy, for reasons that will shortly become apparent. I have never placed much faith in that solitary footnote to History and Class Consciousness, at the very end of Sein und Zeit, which is supposed to document Heidegger’s direct engagement with Lukács’s work of a few years before. Lucien Goldmann’s early argument to this effect always struck me as far-fetched, an exercise in wishful thinking meant essentially to appropriate Heidegger for the Marxian tradition (for Henning, to be sure, Lukács himself is highly ambiguous, always on the point of lapsing into ‘philosophy’, but generally too intelligently Marxian to succumb irrevocably), though discussion



Sandblasting Marx • xiii

is certainly possible, not so much about the left National Socialist elements as about the implicit concept of revolution in general in Heidegger. But I do not think the Seinsfrage in his work, after the Kehre, is particularly incompatible with Marxism, which has proved compatible with so many other ‘philosophies’, inasmuch as it is not – here I agree with Henning – itself a philosophy. But therein lies the problem with Henning’s slogan, for the ontology of the pre-Kehre Heidegger was a phenomenology of the life-world; and if Marx’s object of study is taken to be bürgerliche Gesellschaft in the most general sense, as the dynamics of capital on all its levels, then Marxism has an obligation to include that phenomenology, to which the ‘pragmatic’ Heidegger certainly made a fundamental contribution, if we divest it of its anthropological pretensions (the Ur-Germanic etymologies) and its oversimplified diagnoses of technology. His critique of modernity, whether ‘irrationalist’ or not, is as ambiguous as all such visions, from Burke and the Romantics on down, as Raymond Williams memorably demonstrated in Culture and Society. Its ethical and decisionist moments then remain open to analysis, and will receive their appropriate attention at other stages in Henning’s book. For the philosophising of social themes – let us rather from now on say, of the varied features and manifestations of capitalism – will not take only such narrowly ontological and existentialising forms. It will also have Hegelian variants, particularly in the traditions of the Frankfurt School (among whom, as Henning rightly notes, Habermas is not to be numbered). It is of course outrageous that his very limited comments on Adorno are included, not under the rubric of philosophy, but of religion; although his subtle reading of the works of the ‘school’ as a whole centres on Pollock’s evacuation of Marxian economics in the name of an essentially political shift towards a theory of state capitalism. Without any mention of Marx’s essay on the ‘Jewish question’, Henning’s discussion of the relationship to religion is incomplete, to say the least. Yet I do agree with Henning’s provocative conclusion that the Marx of Capital has no interest in religion whatsoever. The critique of fetishism is the analysis of an illusion or a mirage, important for its structural findings, but not as the social diagnosis of a pathology that can be treated in and of itself – rather its causes must be made to disappear, with the end of the capitalist dynamics of commodity production. Yet from another perspective this quite proper dismissal of the political significance of religion might well be taken to signal the return of that wholesale rejection of the superstructures which characterised so-called orthodox Marxism and which it was the task of a more contemporary ‘Western’ and ‘philosophised’ or ‘ontologised’ Marxism to restore. Is this simply the result of an Althusserian separation of the levels, or does it lapse back into the old ‘materialist’ dismissal of all of what were considered so many ‘idealisms’, from philosophy and religion all the way to ethics and the law? Politics has already been set to one side with a dismissal of its primacy in Leninism, as a displacement. As for culture in general, in whatever form, it is excluded al­together from this

xiv • Sandblasting Marx

book. Above all, there is to be no immanent critical practice of philosophy or anything else, as if this invariably assumed that to identify a faulty idea or ideology was enough to change a society. This is thus only in part a repudiation of ‘pan-Marxism’, as the Chinese call it – that is, of Marxism as a philosophy of everything, or philosophy tout court, the old ‘dialectical materialism’. It is also, if more implicitly, a repudiation of the political fantasies and selfaggrandisement of intellectuals themselves, even if the argument never descends to the ad hominem levels to be found in the Bourdieu school – Bourdieu is himself attacked in passing. But perhaps it is better to grasp Henning’s procedures in a dialectical manner. He himself frequently describes Marx’s rectification of the Hegelian dialectic (in Hegel’s spirit) as an insistence on ‘the difference and yet identity of two realms of being, a unity of opposites’. The model is not that of a reflection, or base-and-superstructure, but rather of metabolism – clearly the more fundamental linguistic figure in Marx’s thinking. What Henning will therefore deplore as an absence of ‘theory’ is the lack of any explanation of the metabolic production of one phenomenon (a faulty concept, say) from out of another one (for example, the structure of the commodity). I myself conclude that if autonomous philosophising, and the illusion that the critique of the faulty concept will modify its structural origin, is to be rejected, the alternative is not best formulated in Henning’s language – less philosophising and more ‘theory’ – but ought rather to call for more philosophising, that is to say, less non-Marxian philosophising and more dialectics as such. We may take as an example what has been stigmatised as the re-entry of a bad Hegelianism into recent Marxian thinking, namely so-called Capitalogic and a resurrected ‘theory of value’, to be found respectively in Helmut Reichelt’s pathbreaking Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx (1970), Hans-Georg Backhaus’s Dialektik der Wertform (1997), and Christopher Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (2002) – a body of work seeking to show that Marx simplified his own thought in the changes he made to the second edition of Capital and thereby made less accessible the properly dialectical nature of his notion of value as the quantity of labour power, and so the origin of the famous fetishism of commodities. Here value becomes a historically unique phenomenon in which a unity-and-difference of the ideal and the material only becomes visible through a dialectical lens. Henning seems to think little enough of these ‘theological subtleties’, and this is not the place to pursue them further. But there ensues an interesting consequence, namely that the formation of value can be understood ‘philosophically’ as well as ‘theoretically’ (in Henning’s sense) or ‘dialectically’ (in mine). That many of the processes described in Capital are survivals, extensions and expansions of the process Marx called ‘alienation’ in his early writings seems unquestionable, as Stanley Moore’s unjustly neglected Three Tactics: The Background in Marx (1963) has shown. The fundamental question is rather whether we should still call them that, whether we should still use this philosophical (or idealistic or metaphysical) word for the later ‘mature’ work. Althusser proposed



Sandblasting Marx • xv

building a firewall against such usage by positing the famous ‘epistemological break’. The Hegelian Marxists however have mostly delighted in this continuity and taken it as an excuse to do the very thing Althusser feared, erecting an existential psycho­logy or even a philosophy or a metaphysics on its basis (Heidegger, indeed, singling out the concept of alienation for ontological approval in his post-war Letter on Humanism). But if the propensity to ontologisation and philosophising is to be named, I propose to call it thematisation. For the minute one thematises such a phenomenon, a process of autonomisation sets in which turns it into the founding term for a new and semiautonomous complex of concepts – call it a philosophy, if you like, or a ‘world-picture’ (Heidegger), an ideology or a worldview. These new thematisations then most often serve as the point of departure for a Kulturkritik, that is to say, a wholesale diagnosis of what is wrong with modern society, its culture, its psychology or subjectivity, its mode of living. Rather than call these discourses attacks on modernity, critiques of it, and the like, as is so often done, it is better to recognise them as a specific discursive form or genre, which passes itself off as an analysis of contemporary (or modern) society that could be viewed as a scientific proposition. Something like this can also happen to the Capitalogicians when they absolutise the diagnosis of fetishism and brandish, as I often do myself, Marx’s own word Verdinglichung or reification. Any of these features of capitalism, when named in such a way as to lend itself to a terminology, can give rise to an idealistic hypostasis in the form of this or that culture critique; and it seems to me precisely this to which Henning so often and so properly objects. His labour has uncovered a rich and varied field of just such language pathologies for us to explore and to ‘theorise’ from a Marxist perspective. I pass over the valuable concluding sections, which trenchantly dissect a variety of social democratic or ‘Third Way’ revisionisms, from Habermas or Rawls to businessphilosophical and neo-pragmatist versions of their normative philosophies in Germany. For it is the Marxist deviations from Marx that are of most interest, rather than the outright and unabashed ‘post-Marxisms’, even if the critique of a return to norms and even to a kind of natural law – whatever function these may on occasion serve as buffers against the hegemony of the free market and its depredations – is probably always salutary and bears repeating worldwide. Yet one cannot entirely endorse the programme with which the book concludes. Henning enumerates four basic features of the various misreadings – intentional or otherwise – of Marxist theory, today and yesterday. These are (1) a substitution of nature for society as Marx’s basic object of study; (2) a misunderstanding of the way in which Marx uses the term ‘law’, as in the laws of capitalism; (3) a retranslation of Marx back into a philosophical discourse; and (4) an interpretation of the ensuing naturalistic world-view ‘according to the hermeneutics of a Lebensphilosophie’, as the expression of a praxis. Henning’s identification of his project with Kant is intended to validate his work as a ‘critique’ that sets limits to what Marxism can do (as well as to celebrate its

xvi • Sandblasting Marx

indispensable achievements). His invocation of Wittgenstein supposes an ambition to cleanse its language of false problems and hypostasised solutions. This worthy task has the advantage of taking us back to the economic essentials without which Marx is not Marxist. But I must necessarily feel, as would any ‘culture worker’, that too much is being abandoned in this project, and not only in cultural analysis itself. There is also the political, about which it can certainly be asserted that Capital has little enough to do with politics and has no political lessons to offer. Yet Marx was, like Lenin, a political strategist (and tactician) of genius, and it does not matter that several distinct and sometimes even antithetical strategies can be detected in his own positions at various historical stages. Capital is a book about capitalism; politics, on the other hand, has to do with the ways in which socialism might be achieved (and constructed). But this does not mean that our judgements on Capital are unpolitical. On the contrary, and without wanting to fall into the error of the substitution of the political for the economic which Henning describes here, such judgements and the analyses of its typical misreadings themselves – the omissions and repressions, the displacements and substitutions – are necessarily political acts.

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 The problem The number of publications devoted to a thinker is generally considered an index of his relevance. For this reason, philosophical works often begin by referring to recent publications that point out a problem worthy of further investigation. The German book market aside, there has not recently been any dearth of reputable publications on Karl Marx.1 While there have also been a number of new German books on Marx, they tend to leave a stale aftertaste of political rearguard action.2 But then, things often work out differently when it comes to Marx. The problem he addressed was not textual, but real: Marx dealt with the terrible condition of the human world. One need only think of the numerous famines in the midst of affluence, the tolerated environmental disasters and the worldwide persistence of social conflict to see that little has changed. The topicality of Karl Marx is better revealed by the phenomena of the real world than by the number of publications devoted to him. One need do no more than peruse daily newspapers to encounter headlines on the rising number of unemployed people, the growing 1. Recent publications in English include Bermann 1999, Itoh 1999, Wheen 1999, Perelmann 2000, Boudin 2001, Dussel 2001, Lee-Lampshire 2001, Oihshi 2001, Renton 2001, Arthur 2002, Brenner 2002, Campbell 2002, Desai 2002, Eatwell 2002, Martin 2002, Megill 2002, Rockmore 2002, Sullivan 2002, Wolff 2002, Antonio 2003. 2. The Cold War of theory is perpetuated by Thomas 1993, Khella 1995, Löw 1996, Löw 2001, Kelpanides 1999, Schöler 1999, Gerhardt 2001, Backes 2002 and Bild Dresden 2002. I have reviewed some of the works published after completion of my book manuscript (M. Berger 2003, Iorio 2003, Kittsteiner 2003, Postone 2003, Heinrich 2004, H.-J. Lenger 2004 and Derrida 2004); see Henning 2004a, Henning 2005.

2 • Chapter One

state deficit, ever new cuts to workers’ benefits, tax cuts for corporations, recurring environmental scandals, explosive economic crises (such as those recently experienced in Asia, Argentina and Brazil) and the slow death of Africa as caused by the debt crisis and AIDS, with the pharmaceutical industry playing a prominent role in the latter.3 Armed conflicts are raging the world over, often in places where divergent economic interests clash, and we have recently begun to witness the erosion of painstakingly achieved international legal standards not just through war4 but also, to cite just one other example, through corruption.5 All this is set to the persistent tune of the global privatisation of education, pension schemes and healthcare, on the one hand, and of the constantly increasing volume and mobility of monetary flows, on the other. Meanwhile, inequality both within and between nations is on the rise the world over. What does this have to do with Marx? All these phenomena can be explained by means of Marx’s theory. They represent the everyday behaviour of the globally active and anarchic capitalist economic system. This makes Marx’s theories more relevant than ever.6 Not only does Marx allow us to understand the interrelatedness of the phenomena mentioned; his theory also provides us with the instruments for deciphering the mechanisms that operate behind them. These mechanisms are something other than what we encounter when perusing the newspaper; they are the objects of a scientific discipline, namely political economy. It was by engaging with the field of political economy that Marx was able to note an acceleration of capitalist growth, periodic crises of the global economy and a tendency toward social polarisation. These mechanisms allow us to explain the processes whose manifestations the newspaper headlines merely describe. Yet if our pre-theoretical perception of social reality demonstrates the relevance of Marx, whichever way we look,7 why is this not reflected in German social philosophy? ‘Because socialism has died’ – that is the usual answer. But to say this is to give proof of one’s own ‘lazy reason’,8 since the political model of the collapsing Soviet states in no way resembled an ‘association of free human beings’.9 Why should the decline of an 3. Werner 2001, pp. 106, 226. 4. Habermas 2003a. 5. Henning 2005. 6. ‘Marx’s theories have never been more relevant’ (Rockmore 2002, p. xii; Wolff 2002). 7. The German edition of the Financial Times featured a portrait of Marx with the caption: ‘Marx would surely have endorsed the globalisation of politics’ (‘Gegen die Allmacht Washingtons’, Financial Times Deutschland, 22 August 2002). German weekly Deutsches Allgemeine Sonntagsblatt wrote: ‘Had Marxism not died, then it ought now to triumph’ (‘Marx und die Banken’, 10 March 2000; see Sichtermann 1990, Ziegler 1992, Cassidy 1997, Hobsbawm 1998, H. Lohmann 2001, p. 137; W. Winkler 2003). In 2001 Moritz Leuenberger opened the 31st World Economic Forum with a quotation from Marx and praised him as an early globaliser, as reported in Financial Times Deutschland, 25 January, ‘Weltsozialforum als Alternative’). 8. Kant 1998, A 689 f. 9. MECW 1, pp. 192 f.; MECW 35, pp. 88 f. The aim was to achieve individuals’ ‘all-round development’ (MECW 5, p. 292) – not the development of man qua isolated individual, but the ‘return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being’ (MECW 3, p. 296; see Fromm 1963).



Introduction • 3

empire that suppressed virtually every emancipatory idea prompt us to close the book on Marx? A mode of thinking that consists, at heart, in criticising existing conditions can never be so closely entwined with something existent as to share in its decline – as the history of Judaeo-Christian religion has proven often enough. There must be other reasons for the fact that Marxist thought, once so central, continues to lie dormant 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and despite the return of turbocapitalism.10 One of these reasons is related to the history of theory: as a school of thought, Marxism exhausted itself long before 1989. On one side of the Iron Curtain, there was dogmatic ‘historical materialism’ and the mantra-like reiteration of its dictums; on the other, there was Western Marxism, diluted into ‘cultural criticism’. Both had long ceased to be theoretically sustainable. Prodded once, these Marxisms collapsed. There could, in any case, be no question of latching onto such ‘atrophied stages’ of Marxism today.11 We can only return to Marxian theory itself, as found in Marx’s own texts. But there is a problem. In order to access Marx’s theory, we first need to work our way through the fatal history of the reception of his texts – the history not only of their political, but also of their theoretical reception. Failing this, we are left with reissues of one or another problematic Marxist narrative, on the basis of which Marx’s texts are subjected to ex ante interpretation. The perpetuation of assessments of Marx’s thought that were already questionable prior to 1989 is evident not just in strategies for justifying the refusal to say anything more about Marx, but also in attempts to keep him alive within theoretical memory – attempts that do more to prevent than to promote a renewed reading of his texts.12 The purpose of this work consists, therefore, in overcoming the barriers-to-reception and immanent distortions that Marxian thought has inherited, at least to the extent that these can be grasped theoretically. It is only in this way that Marxian thought can, once more, be made fruitful for social theory. The present work is a first step in this direction. It addresses one part of the problem, to which it can offer only a limited solution. It seeks to achieve its aim by engaging with two questions: 1) Given Marx’s obvious relevance to pre-theoretical considerations, how are we to understand the fact that the theories of contemporary social science and social philosophy typically shy away from Marx? 10. Fehrmann 1997, Luttwak 1999. 11.  The concept of ‘atrophied stages’ [Schwundstufen] is culled from a pathogenesis of Kantianism (Marquard 1954). On the ‘crisis of Marxism’, see Althusser 1978, Kallscheuer 1986 and the vivid account of Koenen 2001; see also Korsch 1935. 12. Veteran Marxists often recycle older arguments. See, for example, Steigerwald 1996, Backhaus 1997, Stieler 1997, Haug 2001 or Kurz 2001. Honneth 1999a; 2002 and Wildt 1997; 2002 also persist in reading Marx the way they have always done, that is, normativistically. Economists likewise resort to old arguments (Nutzinger 1999, Heinrich 2001, Gerlach 2003). ‘A “positive” reconstruction of Marxian theory needs therefore to be preceded by an examination of this reception history’ (Stephan 1974, p. 111; a similar argument is formulated in Rockmore 2002, pp. xiv, 1 ff.). ‘Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits . . . deeply engrained attitudes of aversion and preference’ (Dewey 2008, p. 14).

4 • Chapter One

2) What are the consequences of this ‘excluded centre’,13 or of the absence of Marxian insights, for the character of contemporary social philosophy? Engagement with these questions will eventually yield systematic prospects for a considered and critical understanding of philosophy. It is from this that the present work derives its title. I chose to restrict the material by which I engage with my two questions in two ways: only theories are considered, and these theories have mainly been formulated in German. These two restrictions are arbitrary, but justified by the very nature of my subject. It is only on such a basis that a methodically precise procedure becomes possible. The approach is presented in section 1.4. The structure of the work follows from it, and is briefly presented for the reader’s orientation (section 1.5). While more will be said below about Marx’s absence from contemporary theories (in section 1.3, by way of introduction), the objective reasons for this absence are not discussed as such, due to my methodological choice to analyse theories only. I will, however, begin by expanding somewhat on my initial remarks about real phenomena, since it is from them that the present work derives its plausibility and motivational force (section 1.2).

1.2 Retaining Marx? A preliminary account of his theory The real question posed by the watershed of 1989 is . . . not the one everyone is talking about (‘Why has socialism failed?’). The question ought rather to be: Why were several generations of communists and left-wing intellectuals able to perceive the state socialism of the most backward regions . . . as a step forward by comparison to the industrialised nations and their highly developed capitalism?14

The present work is intended as a work of philosophy. It does not claim to provide a distinct politico-economic analysis of the present. Nevertheless, every socio-philosophical account works from preliminary notions on the basis of which it has already interpreted the social world.15 The hermeneutical ‘prejudice’ from which the present work begins is a worldview based on common sense. It contains roughly the following assumptions: Today, it is a country’s economic situation that determines the fate of politicians. Culture and education are dependent on economic facts. The better-off dispose of militarily fortified residential complexes not just in Brazil, South Africa and Israel, but also in the USA and England.16 I depart from many contemporary approaches in taking this as pre-theoretical evidence that Marx’s statements are highly relevant to the present. Since 13.  Johannes 1995. 14. Schneider 1992, p. 15. 15. Henning 2001b. 16. For similar observations, see, for example, Philipps 1990, Chomsky 1993, S. George 1995, UNDP 1996, Forrester 1997, Gray 1999, Soros 1999, Klein 2001, Kraus 2001, Chossudovsky 2002, Ziegler 2002, Worldwatch 2003.



Introduction • 5

1989 in particular, it has become clear that capitalism has not ceased to exist. Everything is subordinated to the logic of the market, including areas formerly exempt from it, such as transportation, healthcare, welfare, culture and education. In the USA, there are jobs that are insufficient, by themselves, for earning a living.17 At the same time, incomes are rising rapidly in the upper tiers of society.18 The trend toward unequal development is a clear one, and even the word ‘class’ is being used widely again (‘two-class medical system’, ‘first class’ travel, and such like).19 Yet the presupposition that Marx is relevant to our present is supported not just by economic facts. Marx also pointed out two problems the ‘system’ of capitalism encounters in its relationship with its ‘environment’. Such problems are also becoming increasingly evident today. This is true in a threefold sense: – First, there is social nature. According to Marx, the disadvantaged classes will eventually oppose the capitalist economic system. In fact, much recent history (such as the current second wave of revolution in the Caucasus or in certain South-American countries) cannot be understood without reference to conflicts between social groups with divergent political aims. – Second, there is individual nature. It is exposed to the dominant capitalist culture.20 While the symptoms shift constantly, the causes of many modern psychopathologies cannot be understood without reference to the conditions in which they develop, and these include economic conditions.21 This is true even of racist and patriarchal tendencies or socio-psychological defects such as those analysed by Freud and Sennett at the outset and the close of the twentieth century.22 – Finally, there is ecological nature, the chief victim of economic growth.23

17. Ehrenreich 2001. 18. Kienbaum 2003. 19. According to Werkstadt 2003, Germans dispose of 14,600 billion euros worth of assets after taxes. The lower half of the population owns 4.5 percent of this sum, whereas the upper half own 42.3 percent. There are 365,000 Germans with more than one billion euros worth of monetary assets. A person is considered poor when they earn half the average income; 10.9 percent of WestGerman citizens fall into this category, 66 percent more than during the 1970s. The tax burden is also being redistributed: in 1960, wage earners contributed 11.8 percent of total taxes; in 2000, they contributed 35.4 percent, or three times as much. The share of total taxes represented by income tax has fallen from 31.1 percent in 1960 to 2.7 percent in 2000 (see below, sections 2.4.6; 3.2.3. Henceforth, I will refer to sections by numbers only.) 20. Claessens 1973. 21. Henning 2008. 22. Freud 1900, Sennett 2000; see Reich 1929, Brückner 1972, Holzkamp 1975, Dahmer 1994, Honneth 1994 and 2002a.Everyday phenomena such as the rising levels of classroom violence are cases in point. 23. ‘Capitalist production . . . develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the labourer’ (MECW 35, pp. 507 f.; see also pp. 53 f.; MECW 3, p. 272 and elsewhere; see Fetscher 1985, pp. 110 ff.; 1999, pp. 123 ff.; Grundmann 1991).

6 • Chapter One

It comes as no surprise, from Marx’s point of view, that these three ‘environments’ have found and continue to find the courage to revolt by means of various social movements. The point of attack chosen by Marx’s theory was apologetic economic liberalism, which ignores social differences theoretically, thereby exacerbating them practically. This very school of economic thought has exercised an enormous influence on the leading economic powers and the international economic institutions controlled by them, the IMF and the World Bank24 – resulting in veritable laboratory conditions for the application of Marxian theories.25 But there is more: following the historical doldrums of the 1990s, 11 September 2001 has heralded the return of a full-blown world politics.26 Powerful economic interests are visibly at work within it. And the enemies of capitalism have also long since made their return, from Seattle to Porto Alegre.27 To what preliminary understanding of Marx’s theories are we resorting, when such phenomena are taken to confirm those theories? We are resorting to the approach that assumes the centre of force of modern-day developments lies not in religion, morality, art, politics or philosophy, but in bourgeois society, whose form is shaped by a specific set of economic procedures, the ‘capitalist mode of production’.28 This mode of production is premised on ownership of the means of production by one part of the population, while another part of the population works for the property-owning classes or, to put this more specifically, produces surplus value. Such a manner of looking at things is far from economistic, because it treats the economy as embedded in a social context – after all, the object of Marxian theory is bourgeois society. However, the capitalist economy operates according to laws that are so powerful as gradually to impose themselves upon the basic structure of society,29 shaping even ‘spheres’ once relatively remote from economic affairs – such as science, religion, art and politics – in accordance with the exigencies of the market.30 The mechanism of the capitalist economy, which perpetually regulates itself by means of crises, is increasingly causing these economised areas of society to be exposed to permanent crisis like the others.

24. Huffschmid 1999, pp. 98 ff. 25. ‘But in theory it is assumed that the laws of capitalist production operate in their pure form. In reality there exists only approximation; but, this approximation is the greater, the more developed the capitalist mode of production and the less it is adulterated and amalgamated with survivals of former economic conditions’ (MECW 37, p. 174). 26. Ross 2002. 27. On the critique of globalisation (3.3.6), see Altvater 1996, Hirsch 1996, Martin 1996, Gruppe 1997, Loccumer Initiative 1997, Zugehör 1998, Todd 1999, Starr 2000, Appelt 2001, Biermann 2001, Cassen 2002, Grefe 2002, Löwy 2002, Mander 2002 and Walk 2002. See also (from unexpected quarters) Krugmann 1999, Stiglitz 2002 and Wilke 2001, pp. 7 ff. 28. MECW 35, p. 8. 29. MECW 6, pp. 482 ff. 30. Bröckling 2000.



Introduction • 7

In what sense does this preliminary account of Marxian theory31 allow us to interpret the phenomena we encounter when perusing the newspaper as confirmations? According to Marx, the chief motive behind the capitalist economy is the realisation of profit.32 For the owner of capital, the value-producing agent is human labour; he therefore needs to obtain as much labour as possible, and for as low a price as possible. When workers are too few in number or too expensive from the point of view of the profit motive, the capitalist economy may go into crisis – and, with it, all of society. It should be noted that the crisis does not consist in the economy producing too few goods, but in the propertied classes obtaining too little profit. The national debt, capital flight, high unemployment and the burdens with which employees continue to be saddled all fit this picture. And everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of working hours rising constantly: sixty-hour weeks are no longer unusual, not just for shopkeepers and doctors, but also for white-collar workers and even interns. The average working life will, in all probability, grow longer. Today’s political measures aim primarily to cheapen the ‘labour factor’ and create the best possible tax conditions for corporations. So much for point (a). Points (b) and (c) are also borne out by the facts: An approach that assumes the inherent logic of numerous ‘value spheres’ to be increasingly influenced and distorted by economic imperatives provides explanatory approaches for many of the psychopathologies referred to above. If some value spheres are important for the development of a stable personality (time spent with one’s family and attention received from it, appreciation shown by one’s social environment, opportunities for broad cultural activity), then psychic instabilities come as no surprise.33 Marx called this ‘alienation’.34 Finally, the ecological crisis and recent political upheavals result partly from the fact that the capitalist economy is expanding constantly – and must in fact do so, according to Marx. It trespasses every limit, from the ‘limits to growth’35 to the limits of national politics36. It is no longer out of the ordinary, where economic gain requires intervention in another country’s affairs, for imperial wars of aggression to ensue.37 But war is not necessarily required: similar results can be achieved, according to Marx, by the opening of markets.38 These observations – the list could be 31.  For introductions to Marxian theory, see, for example, W. Blumenberg 1962; Singer 1980; Euchner 1983, H. Lohmann 2000, Callinicos 1995, Eagleton 1997, Fetscher 1999. 32. MECW 37, p. 255. 33. Henning 2008. 34. MECW 3, pp. 271 f. 35. Meadows 1972. 36. Beck 1999, Habermas 2001. 37. Marx and Engels penned analyses of military strategy that were published in the New York Tribune and elsewhere (see Volumes 8–14 of their Collected Works). 38. ‘The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate’ (MECW 6, p. 488). It is not just raw materials and purchasing power that lure capitalists into other countries, but also – and especially – cheap labour power (Sassen 1988).

8 • Chapter One

extended – have not been rendered analytically inconsequential by the fact that the twentieth century has seen the communist alternative discrediting itself irremediably. Yet there is nothing in contemporary social theory that corresponds to this insight, except a major lacuna.

1.3 The lacuna in contemporary social theory The critique of progress is in vogue in contemporary theory. But it tends to remain inconsequential. Some authors’ habit of resorting to out-of-the-way sources meets with appreciation, but as a rule, citing books published more than twenty years ago is considered an aberration. Yet this says more about the literature cited than about those citing it: if works of social philosophy date so quickly, the reason could be that many of them were written to be ‘topical’. This, however, discredits the notion of an automatic progress of knowledge within the humanities.39 Assuming the existence of such progress is problematic. It would seem that certain sets of problems are sometimes left unattended to. This would explain the recurrent phenomena of renaissances and rediscoveries.40 In the humanities, neglect of certain problems is usually due less to a ‘refutation’ than to a change in th