On Reading Marx Apolitically
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On Sheldon Wolin's account, the early Marx was motivated by a desire to remake society as a whole as well as to redeem humanity. Later, when he saw that his wild ambitions were unrealistic, he sank back into a thinly veiled despair. These two poses are closely related. They coalesce into an image of Marx as an utterly apolitical theorist, as a thinker childishly incapable of enduring the disappointment of his most absurd yearnings. I shall not ask if this is an accurate portrait of Marx. What I wish to examine is why Wolin finds the apolitical Marx he portrays so attractive and why he misleadingly titles his analysis “reading Marx politically.” I shall begin by recapitulating the basic thesis of the paper as I understand it and by dissecting the assumptions that underlie it. Implicit in my summary will be a criticism of Wolin's views. One of the charming things about this paper, of course, is the way it teaches us that we may be critical without being unfriendly. If you show that someone is wrong, you have also shown that he is right. If he is wrong he is right. If he is dead, he is immortal. I have chosen to summarize the paper as follows. It is jerrybuilt mythology, but it has its point: Prometheus swallowed Prometheus and gave birth to heroic failure. Let me explain. Prometheus, that is to say, the industrial revolution, preempted and supplanted an earlier political revolution or revolutionary tradition that had nurtured heroic, Promethean ambitions (the redemption of man). This sublimation of personal action by impersonal movement is a pattern that can be found both in nineteenth-century European societies as they developed and in Marx's theory as it developed. Marx's theory was a symbolic reenactment of the process of history: Marx too had a preindustrial phase. The earlier Marx's emphasis on human action (or “the political”) was embodied in his two concepts of “revolution” and “the proletariat,” which are paradoxically described by Professor Wolin as traditional residues in Marx's thought, because they echo the ideas of a mythic legislator founding a new order and, more banally, of purposive political action. Gradually, as Marx pondered the massive, impersonal forces of nineteenth-century capitalism, he abandoned his earlier hope that political action might give birth to a new order and embraced, or seemed to embrace, the theory that capitalism's own internal logic would lead to its collapse and to the creation of a classless society. Politics of the barricade was replaced by “the meta politics of industrial cosmogony.” Wolin has coined such an ugly phrase in order to drive home the point that Delacroix could never have painted a picture of such an impersonal revolution. So far, we have Prometheus swallowing Prometheus. But what about the birth of heroic failure? Even though he is crucially concerned with “Marx's despair” (§7), Wolin wants to avoid labeling Marx a simple failure. Marx's defeat was complex and pregnant with meaning. Marx's prognosis that capitalism would eventually collapse because of its own internal development, Wolin argues, must not be understood as a scientific prediction. Instead, it should be interpreted psychologically as Marx's last-ditch protest against his discovery of capitalism's uncanny ability to survive. The pessimism of Marx's analysis might be said to belie the optimism of his predictions. But Wolin prefers the opposite formulation: the optimism of Marx's predictions are a cry of impotent rage against the scientific and technological innovations that have rendered capitalism indestructible. Wolin focuses on two anomalies of Marx's work: that he could never complete anything he started, and that he persisted absurdly in labeling the mechanical collapse of capitalism with the misleading name of a “proletarian revolution.” This was a fraudulent personification of an utterly impersonal process. Wolin interprets both the incompleteness and the misnomer as implicit confessions on Marx's part that the game was up, that there was no chance for heaven on earth and that capitalism was immortal. The system would lurch from crisis to crisis, but it would never die. Marx's theoretical discoveries forced this bitter conclusion on him, even though it clashed radically with his optimistic political intentions. Thus Wolin inverts the Marxist tag that without theory will be no revolution, and tells us that with theory there will be no revolution. Marx could not publicly admit his disappointing discovery (nor privately to himself), but he could not fully suppress it either. He was too honest for this. It came out in the fragmentary state of his work, and in his continuing to brandish the passe language of political action to depict the collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions. System dysfunction could never be action. By calling it action, however, Marx admitted both that action was his dream and that the breakdown of capitalism was nothing but a dream. Likewise all those false predictions simultaneously concealed the bitter truth, and revealed Marx's juvenile longings.
Source Publication
Marxism: Nomos XXVI
Source Editors/Authors
J. Roland Pennock, John Chapman
Publication Date
1983
Recommended Citation
Holmes, Stephen, "On Reading Marx Apolitically" (1983). Faculty Chapters. 823.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/823
