Postmodernism and the Revival of Socialism as Critique

Abstract

Socialism as a political philosophy confronts many theoretical and empirical challenges in our contemporary world. Some thinkers consider it obsolete and others aspire to reformulate it by couching it in a more pragmatist idiom. My aim here is to show that the salient features of socialism, those that are worth preserving, presuppose the indispensability of critique and reflective subjectivity in a sense that goes beyond pragmatism. To develop my argument for a socialist theory that can benefit from postmodern challenges without surrendering its critical force, I review some recent ideas in the socialist discourse and I contrast them with Cornelius Castoriades's theory of socialism. I conclude by defending the possibility for a new articulation of the socialist project, one that takes into account past failures as well as the shortcomings of current socialist trends.

Notes

Notes

1. Richard J. Arneson, “Is Socialism Dead? A Comment on Market Socialism and Basic Income Capitalism,” Ethics 102.3 (1992): 487.

2. On the implausibility of this assumption as it is exemplified in John Rawls, see Marianna Papastephanou, “The Implicit Assumptions of Dividing a Cake: Political or Comprehensive?” Human Studies 27 (2004): 307–34.

3. See for instance, Philippe Van Parijs, “Why Surfers Should Be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 20 (1991): 101–31. Admittedly, Arneson considers this text and its arguments but he does not do full justice to them in my view.

4. Kai Nielsen, “Toward a Liberal Socialist Cosmopolitan Nationalism,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 11.4 (2003): 438.

5. Quoted by Vincent Geohegan in Political Ideologies, ed. Robert Eccleshall et al. (London: Routledge, 1992), 117.

6. The search for the salient features of a theory that has known so many and diverse formulations and outlines is doomed to abstraction and simplification. But, whereas the bracketing of the plurality of socialisms and the lack of sharp differentiations is a costly tactic if the aim is to construct a viable theory as a concrete counter-response to existing ones, it is necessary and unavoidable when the aim is to raise metatheoretical issues.

7. See Marianna Papastephanou, “Rawls's Theory of Justice and Citizenship Education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 39.3 (2005): 499–518.

8. See Nicos Poulantzas, L’État, le Pouvoir, le Socialisme (Paris: Quadrige-Presses Universitaires de France, 1978).

9. See Carol Munn-Giddings, “Links between Kropotkin's Theory of ‘Mutual Aid’ and the Values and Practices of Action Research,” Educational Action Research 9.1 (2001): 151.

10. Even Kant's continental liberalism raises anthropological barriers to genuine sociability by putting forward the well-known idea of ‘unsocial sociability’ supposedly characteristic of the human species.

11. For more on this, see Christopher Norris, The Truth about Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 290 ff.

12. Nielsen, “Toward a Liberal Socialist Cosmopolitan Nationalism,” 438.

13. For a discussion of such a reduction, see Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

14. See John E. Roemer, “The Morality and Efficiency of Market Socialism,” Ethics 102.3 (1992): 450.

15. See, for instance, Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1945); Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974); and Fredrick A. von Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science (Indianapolis, IN: Free Press, 1952).

16. See, for instance, Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957); and John O’Neill, Sociology as a Skin Trade (London: Heinemann, 1972), 123.

17. Ibid, 126.

18. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

19. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

20. For such a critique of Rorty, see Marianna Papastephanou, “The Idea of Emancipation from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” Continental Philosophy Review 33 (2000): 395–415.

21. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Just Gaming (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 59.

22. See Ernesto Laclau, “Democracy and the Question of Power,” Constellations 8.1 (2001): 3–14.

23. Andrew Norris, “Against Antagonism: On Ernesto Laclau's Political Thought,” Constellations 9.4 (2002): 554–73; Norris, The Truth about Postmodernism, 290ff.

24. The lines I consider politically relevant are explained in Marianna Papastephanou, “The Political Relevance of Postmodernism,” Krisis 11 (2001): 1–17.

25. Anthony Giddens, The Third Way (Oxford: Polity Press and Blackwell, 1998).

26. Roemer, “The Morality and Efficiency of Market Socialism,” 463.

27. Ibid., 451.

28. For more on this, see Marianna Papastephanou, “Prospects for Thinking Deconstruction Postmetaphysically: Postmodernism Minus the Quote-Marks,” in Jacques Derrida, ed. D. Roden and C. Norris (London: Sage, 2002).

29. Geoff Andrews, “Modernity, Managerialism and the Third Way,” in The Proceedings of the International Conference on The Liberal Order, ed. Gideon Calder (Olomouc-Czech Republic, 1999), 4.

30. It should be noted that Roemer's market socialism is not susceptible to this line of criticism, as it combines market antagonism with public ownership and competitive politics. He explains that “the two major differences between this kind of market socialism and capitalism are the direction of investment by a political process and a more egalitarian income distribution” (455).

31. Andrews, “Modernity, Managerialism and the Third Way.”

32. Ibid., 1.

33. Ibid., 4.

34. Ibid., 5.

35. This assertion by Andrews is evident in Giddens's discussion of the welfare state from a social-democratic point of view.

36. Andrews, “Modernity, Managerialism and the Third Way,” 6.

37. On the detrimental effects of globalization, see Zygmunt Bauman, “On Glocalization: Or Globalization for Some, Localization for Some Others,” Thesis Eleven 54 (1998): 37–51.

38. I will not discuss the possibility for a socialist reaction to capitalism by society itself, for lack of space, but I quote the following Habermasian lines: “Socialism, with its conviction that ‘the socially integrating force of solidarity should be in a position to stake its claim against the other social forces, money and administrative power, through a wide range of democratic forums and institutions,’ represents lifeworld potentials.” Nancy S. Love, “What's Left of Marx?” in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 56.

39. Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: ‘This May Be True in Theory, But It Does Not Apply in Practice,’” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 63.

40. Kant, “Theory and Practice,” 89.

41. Cornelius Castoriades, in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. Davis Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 46.

42. Ibid., 48. See also Cornelius Castoriades, Political and Social Writings, 3 vols. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988–93).

43. See Albrecht Wellmer, “The Institution of a Common World and the Problem of Truth,” in Reason and Its Other: Rationality in Modern German Philosophy and Culture, ed. D. Freundlieb and W. Hudson (Providence, RI: Berg, 1993), 104.

44. Tony Bennett, “Texts in History,” in Poststructuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 66.

45. This point becomes more tangible in educational theory, in Marianna Papastephanou, “Educational Critique, Critical Thinking and the Critical Philosophical Traditions,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 38.3 (2004): 369–78.

46. Elsewhere, I explain how this works even in the case of Rawls's difference principle and detail how it affects citizenship and political consciousness in undesirable ways. See, Papastephanou, “Rawls's Theory of Justice and Citizenship Education.”

47. Nancy S. Love cites Dennis Fischman, Political Discourse in Exile: Karl Marx and the Jewish Question (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), in “What's Left of Marx?” 63.