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Abstract
This article analyses the differentia specifica (specific difference) of the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism in the areas of the methodology and philosophy of history and of the socio-political process. Among the main characteristics of the school, the authors stress the importance assigned to the ‘new’ dialectic of the ‘sunset’, genesis and transformation of socio-economic systems. Typical of this process are (1) non-linear evolution (or involution), including the dialectical unity of reforms and counter-reforms, revolutions and counter-revolutions; (2) the decline of objective basic determination and growth of the role of subjective factors; (3) the multi-scenario character of transformations, and so on. Also analysed are the contradictions, limits and potential of the social creativity of free association, in contrast to ‘activism’. The authors also provide a detailed account of Marxist studies in post-Soviet Russia, and show the place occupied by their school within this area.
Notes
1 Throughout the first decade of the century articles on questions of Marxism were regularly published in Russia even in such key academic journals such as Voprosy Filosofii and Voprosy Ekonomiki. Articles of this type have also appeared on a systematic basis in the pages of the journal Svobodnaya Mysl'. The School of Critical Marxism has been represented by articles published in virtually every issue of the journal Alternativy over the past 20 years.
2 These works include in particular such books as Buzgalin Citation(1998a); Buzgalin and Kolganov Citation(2001); Buzgalin and Mironov Citation(2009); Buzgalin Citation(2009); Buzgalin and Ozhogina Citation(2010); Buzgalin and Linke Citation(2010); and others.
3 We should remind readers of various remarks, very important in this context, that were made by Marx in the third volume of Capital and by Engels in Anti-Dühring, and which summarise their vision of future human emancipation: ‘The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with the realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is its basic prerequisite’ (Marx Citation1971, 820).
‘Man's own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history – only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the humanity's leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom’ (Engels Citation1975, 270).
4 There is a widespread view that postmodernism is a left-wing, oppositionist intellectual current. A certain basis exists for this; Baudrillard Citation(2005) and Jameson Citation(1991), Derrida Citation(1994) and Žižek Citation(2009), Hardt and Negri (Citation2000; Citation2004) can all, despite substantial differences, be grouped with left-wing intellectuals. But to one degree or another all of them take a negative attitude to dialectics, above all for the reason that dialectics brings with it the potential for concrete, systemic, and most importantly, positive negation, taking the form of the annulling-creation of the world by an active and associated subject. For postmodernism the most important thing is asystemic (that is, constructed according to the principle of monads and based on deterrialisation and decentration) deconstruction and de-subjectification. But more about this later.
5 Thus, Jacques Derrida (Citation2007, 43, 50, 99, 107) speaks directly of the need to ‘deconstruct everything that connects the concepts and norms of science with ontotheology, with logocentrism, and with phonologism. This is a vast and interminable labour…. To deconstruct opposition means first at a certain moment to overturn a hierarchy… As can be seen in the texts indicated and in the White Mythology by anyone who cares to read it, the most general heading for the whole question would be: castration and mimesis. Here I can only refer to these analyses and to their consistent nature. Essentially, the concept of castration is inseparable in this analysis from that of dissipation’.
6 We should note that in the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s a world-ranking School of Critical Marxist dialecticians took shape, represented by such figures as E. Ilyenkov, V. Vazyulin, G. Batishchev, and others.
7 These arguments are posed, in particular, in Lenin's work Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism, and in his notebooks on imperialism. Soviet writers to address this topic include N.A. Tsagolov, S.E. Yanchenko, V.V. Kulikov, A.A. Porokhovskiy and others from the so-called Tsagolov School, including the authors of this text.
8 These are developed in part four of our book (Buzgalin and Kolganov Citation2004). The argument that revolutions constitute periods of social bifurcation is also explored in the works of O.N. Smolin. We did not, of course, formulate these positions on an empty field. Numerous well-known works on questions of the theory of revolution by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg and various Soviet authors (especially G. Vodolazov, who during the Soviet period defended the positions of revolutionary Marxism) are far from being simply apologetic texts, but contain ample groundwork for the conclusions set out earlier.
9 Here we can and should give postmodernism its due. Many of the representatives of its left wing are characterised not by a total rejection of any and all laws of evolution, but ‘merely’ by a stress on the existence of numerous variants of development, endlessly open and unrestricted and hence incapable of being known completely (or at all). In light of what has been said earlier, this stress is obviously no chance occurrence. In our view, it is precisely this aspect of postmodernism that is conditioned by the fact that at the present stage of ‘decline’ of the capitalist system the above-mentioned multi-variant (multi-scenario) nature of the processes of the decline and birth of systems, their mutual transition, is becoming more the rule than the exception. This objective process also finds its somewhat mystified and absolutised reflection in postmodernism, especially in the writings of M. Hardt and A. Negri (2000; 2004) and J. Derrida (1994).
10 As an example, one can cite the numerous works by Yu.M. Osipov and Zotova Citation(2005) which examine this position in detail.
11 This is typical in particular of most scholars studying the genesis of the post-industrial (information, knowledge-intensive) economy since D. Bell Citation(1973), if not earlier.
12 From this flows the well-known consequence: the market and capital, as key elements of the capitalist system of productive relations, stimulate above all the growth of material wealth and utilitarian consumption. Nature, science, art and other key components of progress are seen by the market and capital not as universal values of economic activity, but as means of enrichment that come free of charge, and which therefore are subject to maximum exploitation.
13 As a brief clarification it will be noted that the range of simulacra now includes not just the phenomena of the ‘branded’ economy and other phenomena superbly described by Baudrillard and his colleagues, but also the rapidly growing virtual forms of fictitious finance capital; the accelerating production of armaments, including such catastrophically dangerous examples as weapons of mass destruction; the expansion of faux-glamorous ‘culture’; and much else. To this may be added the widely known (but, in our case, derived from analysis of the contradictions of global capital) contradictions between such antagonists as surfeit at one pole and poverty at the other, and also the environmental limits of the market and capital.
14 It should be noted that this way of posing the question is also to be found in the works of Karl Marx himself (especially in his economic and economic-philosophical manuscripts), and in the works of a number of his twentieth-century followers.
15 In deference to the politico-economic specialisation of the authors, we note that, for example, the methodology of neoclassical economic theory going back to the philosophy of positivism (and this is still more true of postmodernism) denies progress completely, while real economic policy, founded on neoclassical postulates, takes as its criterion of progress the degree to which economic systems approach the ideal of the free competitive market. This emerges with particular clarity in neoclassical interpretations of the transformations in Russia, where ‘transition to the market’ is a goal in itself. As practice has shown, this goal is held to justify the use of any methods without reservation, including massive regression in the area of ‘human qualities’ – in precise accordance with the letter and spirit of Machiavelli-Stalin.
