Table Of ContentMarxism After Modernity
Also by Ross Abbinnett
TRUTH AND SOCIAL SCIENCE: From Hegel to Deconstruction
CULTURE AND IDENTITY: Critical Theories
Marxism After Modernity
Politics, Technology and
Social Transformation
Ross Abbinnett
University ofB irmingham
ISBN 978-1-349-52064-0 ISBN 978-0-230-62754-3 (eBook)
DOl 10.1057/9780230627543
© Ross Abbinnett 2006
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-1-4039-4124-4
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abbinnett, Ross.
Marxism after modernity : politics, technology, and social
transformation I Ross Abbinnett.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Communism and society. 2. Postmodernism. 3. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883.
I. Title.
HX542.A23 2006
335.4-dc22 2006049419
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
Transferred to Digital Printing 20 II
I will always wonder if the idea of Marxism - the self-identity of
Marxist discourse or system or even science of philosophy - is
not incompatible with the event-Marx.
Jacques Derrida, 1993
Contents
Introduction 1
Part I Ideology, Aesthetics and Mass Culture
1 Materialism and Ideology 9
2 The Reification of Culture 18
3 The Rise of Ludic Aestheticism 29
4 Capitalism and the Hyperreal 40
5 Ideology and Difference 51
Part II Capitalism and Technology
6 Machines and Socialized Production 63
7 The Origins of Technocracy: Heidegger and Marcuse 74
8 Civilized Capitalist Machines: Deleuze and Negri 82
9 The Ethics of Technological Effects: Derrida and Stiegler 101
Part III Globalization and the New International
10 Colonialism and Imperialism 117
11 World Markets and Global Transformations 126
12 Biopolitical Production and the 'New Science
of Democracy' 133
13 Transeconomic Capitalism 144
14 The Politics of Hospitality 152
Part IV Marxism, Postmodernism and the Political
15 Marx and the Powers of Capital 169
16 A Post-Ontological Marxism? 177
17 The Protocols of Class Politics 195
18 Conclusion 204
Notes 208
Bibliography 219
Index 224
Introduction
There is a close relationship between Marx's thought and the onset of
modernity; indeed the very idea of Marxism is inconceivable outside of
the historical conjunction of Enlightenment philosophy, economic
rationalization, techno-scientific innovation and social detradtionaliza-
tion which emerged in Europe after the Middle Ages. Marx's intellectual
project is marked by an increasingly acute sense of the economic and
technological mechanisms through which the old feudal order was
being displaced by a new regime based on the realization of profit
through the sale of commodities. The dynamics of this process are, of
course, very complex; the old regime did not simply cede its place to the
new, and entered into a period of violent conflict with the emergent
forms of mercantile and manufacturing capital. However, the tendency
towards the rationalization of production that was initiated by the
commodity form is, for Marx, the seed of the future; for in the end,
the feudal economy, with its reliance on absolutist authority and archaic
agrarianism, could not compete with the new forms of trade and
manufacture which had established themselves in the cities. Thus, by
the early nineteenth century a proto-capitalist economy had emerged in
Europe; an economy which, despite the continued predominance
of agricultural production, had begun to establish the exchange of
commodities for money as the dominant form of economic activity, to
determine the legal conditions of free citizenship, and to extend the
cooperative regime of manufacture into a plurality of different kinds of
craft production.
Marx's critique of Hegel is focused on the point at which his philosophy
makes contact with the violent and contradictory reality of civil society.
According to Marx, the Philosophy of Right sought to mediate this con-
tact through the categories of absolute spirit, that is, the transcendental
1
2 Marxism after Modernity
forms of unity, particularity and difference whose dialectical movement
Hegel mapped out in the Science of Logic and Phenomenology of Mind
(Marx, 1977c: 27). Thus the account of civil society which is present in
the Philosophy of Right begins with the assumption that the self-
interested individuals who make up the sphere of commercial activity,
constitute a web of instrumental connections which, in the end, finds
its completion in the substantive public morality of the state (Hegel,
1967b: 154-5). For Marx, however, Hegel's assumption of a transcen-
dental unity which precedes the material dynamics of capital, leads his
political thought into a kind of archaism; for although he was one of the
first philosophers to consider the impact of economic individualism on
the organic ties of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), his philosophy returns to the
corporate structures of the feudal regime as a solution to the moral
dislocation of civil SOCiety (Ibid.: 152-5). The materialist dialectic which
Marx proposes, therefore, is more than a simple 'inversion' of Hegel's
idealism; rather it establishes the conditions of a critique of (capitalist)
modernity in which economic and technological transformations in the
mode of production are understood as constantly altering the political
and ideological integration of the social bond. For Hegel, the inequalities
that are reproduced by the expansion of civil society retain a moral
significance which derives from the fact that ethical life ought to reflect
the autonomous differentiation of spirit into its implicit/objective and
explicit/subjective categories. Marx, on the other hand, conceives such
inequalities as intrinsic to the production of commodities; for the acquis-
itiveness of individual capitalist entrepreneurs constantly intensifies the
drive to extend the working day, force down wages, increase expenditure
on machine technology and intensify the overall rate of exploitation. It
is this logic, this general economy of expropriation, which will occupy
the rest of the book.
The Communist Manifesto makes it clear that, for Marx, capitalist
modernity is simultaneously archaic and progressive, barbarous and
civilized. On the one hand it brings about unprecedented growth in the
productive potential of humanity, stimulates scientific and technologi-
cal innovation, and establishes an international market in every
conceivable commodity. On the other hand however, the money-
commodity-money (M-C-M) relation is still founded upon private
ownership; and so the mode of production continues to deprive the
majority of workers of their fair share of the social product, alienates
them from their essential self-creativity, and produces a class of univer-
sally impoverished human beings (Marx, 1998: 3-16). What lies at
the core of Marx's analysis therefore is the idea that the evolution of
Introduction 3
large-scale industrial capitalism pushes the logic of the commodity form
(Le. the constant drive to force up the rate of relative surplus value in
order to overcome the decline in profit caused by the application of
machine technologies to the productive process) to the point where the
economy becomes utterly crisis ridden, and the impoverishment of
organic labour gives rise to the means of revolutionary transformation
(the international proletariat). This bequeaths us two momentous
questions. First, given the history of capitalism since the end of the
nineteenth century, is it still credible to maintain that its general
evolutionary tendency is determined by the archaism of the M-C-M
relation, that is, by the deepening crises of under-consumption, over-
production, unemployment and inflation which arise from the ever
more intensive exploitation of labour? And second, how has the media-
techno-scientific restructuring of capitalism impacted upon the
revolutionary dialectics of class struggle?
The history of twentieth-century Marxism has been the history of
these two questions; from the Second International onwards Marx's
expositors have tried to carryon in the spirit of his critique of capital
while modifying the terms of his materialist dialectics. As the title of the
book suggests, I am interested in examining the relationship between
what David Harvey has called the 'postmodern restructuring' of capital-
ism and the 'postmodernist theory' through which this restructuring
has been conceptualized (Harvey, 1999: 344). Harvey's argument is a
familiar one, and deploys a logic which is common to a number of neo-
Marxist critics (Perry Anderson, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Alex
Callinicos). The contention is that, in general, the concepts that are pre-
sented in the work of a highly suspect group of French intellectuals,
namely Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and Jean-
Francoise Lyotard, is a disguised form of neo-liberalism: the perpetual
pursuit of 'difference' is conceived as the apotheosis of bourgeois indi-
vidualism, the critique of 'totalizing discourse' is presented as an aban-
donment of universal principles of justice and the insistence upon the
transformative power of the aesthetic is narrated as a retreat from the
politics of everyday life into the self-serVing intellectualism of the avant
garde. In essence, therefore, postmodernist theory could not be further
from the spirit of Marxism; for the methodological canon which Marx
developed demands that a critical theory of capital should, at the very
least, retain a sense of the political complicities of pure 'difference', of
the universal principles which ought to govern a properly democratic
society, and of the ideological power of the aesthetic in the constitution
of mass conformity. Like all generalizations, however, this one is
