Rethinking Socialism: Community, Democracy, and Social Agency

Abstract

In this essay, we show how Marxian theory can contribute to the ongoing rethinking of the concepts of “community” and “democracy,” especially in relation to the question of “social agency.” Our discussion is organized around a particular reading of Marx's concept of commodity fetishism and broadens the notions of “the social” and of “the economy” beyond the unidimensional concepts that have undergirded much of orthodox thinking, transforming them into spaces that are both multidimensional (consisting of plural agencies) and polymorphous (comprising plural forms of agency).

Keywords:

• Socialism
• Communism
• Common
• Democracy
• Agency

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Anna Curcio and Ceren Özselçuk, the organizers of “The Common and the Forms of the Commune: Alternative Social Imaginaries” conference, for the kind invitation to present our work there. We also want to acknowledge the generous and helpful comments by Deborah Jenson, Frederico Luisetti, and the other participants in the session and, in revising our essay for Rethinking Marxism, the suggestions made by Özselçuk. This essay is a revised version of “Socialism, Community, and Democracy: A Postmodern Marxian Perspective,” published in Future Directions for Heterodox Economics, edited by John T. Harvey and Robert F. Garnett (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). We want to thank the press for permission to publish it here.

Notes

¹Among the many schools of thought encompassed by heterodox economics, Austrians have historically been least interested in imagining and developing alternatives to capitalism. However, in recent years, Austrian conceptions of postcapitalism or socialism have received increased attention. See, for example, the debate among Stephen Cullenberg, David Prychitko, Peter Boettke, and Theodore Burczak, titled “Socialism, Capitalism, and the Labor Theory of Property: A Marxian-Austrian Dialogue,” in Rethinking Marxism (1998).

²Our formulation of a polymorphous and multiplicitous ontology of social being undergirding the Marxist imaginary moves also, we think, along lines somewhat different from those followed by the Autonomist school of Marxism, as developed in the work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Whereas they attempt to break out of the traps and impasses of classical Marxism by transforming the concept of labor (from material to immaterial), we propose to do so by creating a space for the representation of social being in addition to and beyond the one dimension of labor (whether material or immaterial).

³What we are referring to as the school of postmodern Marxism is closely related to the journal Rethinking Marxism whose editors have, over the course of the past two decades, built on and extended the elements of the “melting vision” initially articulated by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto—elements that need to be read against the grain of a more deterministic approach which can also be located within that text. See, for example, the work of Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff (1987), David F. Ruccio and Jack Amariglio (1994), Stephen Cullenberg (1994), Antonio Callari and David F. Ruccio (1996), and J. K. Gibson-Graham (1996).

⁴Our focus here is on economists’ Utopian visions vis-à-vis the economy and society. Closely connected (but not in any simple or direct mann er) is their Utopian vision of the role of economists themselves. The “official” view is that economic scientists are—or, at least, aspire to be—rational, objective, distinterested, and so on (with associated debates about how these qualities can best be secured, usually invoking one or another version of the “scientific method”). Dissenters argue that economists are often guided by intuition, connectedness, ethics and values, and so on—and that, in the best of worlds, economists would recognize how their work is both enabled and constrained by these qualities.

⁵Thus, from the Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’” (Marx and Engels 1976, 487).

⁶In a parallel project, Deirdre McCloskey has chided “Samuelsonian economics” for focusing exclusively on individual self-interest and forgetting about the other dimensions of market-based social agency—talk, humor, respect, honesty, and so on—which she summarizes as “bourgeois virtue” (1994, 1996, 1998). While we are sympathetic to her critique of the “vices” of bourgeois economics and her argument that bourgeois culture is both a condition and product of commodity exchange, her project is diametrically opposed to our own in at least two respects: first, whereas she concludes that a “world market … run by the bourgeoisie” has existed for centuries, we (along with Marx and Polanyi) see a capitalist market system (defined by the commodification of means of production, consumption goods, and labor power) as emerging much more recently; and second, she fails to see the existence of capitalist exploitation and, thus, to imagine the emergence and development of noncapitalist virtues other than those labeled as aristocratic and peasant.

⁷The distinction between “common being” and “being in common” is due to Nancy (1991).

⁸A Utopian vision, the idea that there is an alternative to the present economic and social order, is not equivalent to a blueprint of noncapitalism, at least in the Marxian tradition. While Utopian (and, of course, dystopian) visions have mostly been associated with modernist thinking, there has always been a postmodern “hesitation” in Marxian thought, which refuses to elaborate in any detail the preferred or feasible alternatives to capitalism. Actual noncapitalist alternatives depend on the aleatory process of actual social struggles, including the complex and combined theories (critiques and Utopian visions) that orient and inform such struggles. As Daniel Bensaïd has elegantly explained, “Marx … refused to draft blueprints for posterity, or to stoke up the fire under the cooking-pots of the future. He did not construct plans for a perfect society that charlatans would gladly flog on the black market. He was content to wedge open the door through which a faint glimmer of the future filtered” (2002, 27).

⁹To be clear, we are not criticizing the presence or effects of individual markets or controls, within either capitalism or socialism. Indeed, the postmodernism of our Marxism suggests that there is no market (or, for that matter, control over or intervention into markets) “in general.” Indeed, we can imagine many concrete circumstances in which markets can secure the conditions of existence of noncapitalist (collective, communal) forms of production and subjectivities. Our concern is, rather, with the bourgeois project of creating a “market system,” of imposing capitalist markets and market-based solutions—and corresponding agencies and consciousnesses—in any and all arenas of social life, and with suggestions that controls over particular markets (within such a system) are sufficient to achieve social justice.

¹⁰For all that Amartya Sen has challenged the mainstream definition of economic development as “an immense accumulation of commodities” and thus has contributed to a multidimensional conception of development in terms of various human capabilities (e.g., Sen 1999), he still presumes a uniform social space and associated form of consciousness (even if, in the spirit of Adam Smith, the “success of capitalism” is predicated on motivations other than pure self-interest). See Callari (2004).

¹¹In other words, each tradition, in its own way, has sought to deconstruct “the economy” as represented within bourgeois economics and to explore the relations between the spaces and agencies of commodity value and the other spaces and agencies that exist, both within and outside the economy.

¹²In fact, not only do we, working in and around the discipline of economics, value the kinds of interactions with other traditions of heterodox economic thought, we think that heterodox economists (both Marxist and non-Marxist) would do well to become aware of developments in other fields—from anthropology and sociology to literary theory and cultural studies—in order to deconstruct the close space of “the economy” as well as of the discipline of economics.

¹³See, for example, the work of Amariglio (1984), Wolff and Resnick (1988, 2002), Saitta (1988), and Ruccio (1992).