Was It Simple to Be a Marxist in Economics? A Tribute to Stephen Resnick

Abstract

This essay was written in honor of Stephen Resnick. It places his work in the tradition of activism and performativity of theory associated with Luis Althusser, and it situates his work in a particular political and theoretical conjuncture (as it situates Althusser’s work in its own conjuncture). It argues that Resnick’s theoretical practice was designed, as Althusser’s had been, to give class-struggles an epistemic value, that this practice is best understood in terms of the Gramscian notion of a war of position (applied to theory), and that this war of position entailed a rhetoric of confrontation and an acceptance of risk. It argues finally that the legacy of Stephen Resnick can be secured only by the continuation of a politically grounded practice of theory.

Key Words:

• Marxism
• Overdetermination
• Point of Entry
• Stephen Resnick
• Theoretical Practice

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Elisabeth King and Serap Kayatekin for their comments and their patience.

Notes

1 This adumbrates two theses. First, there is no way, there cannot be a way, of being a Marxist in general, in the void of the abstract. To be a Marxist is to engage in a certain practice, and since practice is always concrete, one can be a Marxist only concretely, in a particular context, under particular circumstances: “to be a Marxist” must always be read as “to be a Marxist in … X.” This X can be a discourse/discipline—e.g., economics, or philosophy—or a nondiscursive practice—e.g., politics, or organizing—with any of these further related concretely with the others. Second, being a Marxist in X (e.g., economics) is different from being a Marxist X-practitioner (e.g., an economist). Which protocols (those of Marxism or those of X) control the practice of the being?

2 Here, Althusser should have added explicitly what I think is implicit in his overall work (that is, his work of going to great pains to remove the mark—or at least certain marks––of Hegel from Marx): namely, as “it marks itself off from [one of] its opponents,” a philosophy inevitably carries the marks of the opponent.

3 “No philosophy can exist within [a] theoretical relation of force except in so far as it … lays siege to that part of the positions [its opponents] have had to occupy in order to guarantee their power over the enemy whose impress they bear” (Althusser 1976, 166; emphasis added).

4 According to Grahame Locke (translator, editor, and author of the Introduction in Althusser 1976), “Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy? contain[s] the main arguments with which Louis Althusser accompanied his submission, at the university of Picardy, of certain of his earlier writings [on Montesquieu, Feuerbach, and Marx] for the degree of doctorat d’Etat” (165). See also Balibar (2006).

5 Famously, Althusser argued that, if it depended on a guarantee of Knowledge (knowledge grounded in any idealist-essentialist concept of “Man”), the struggle for socialism-communism remained within bourgeois (both theoretical and practical) horizons and inhibited (or perhaps even foreclosed) an agency (as of the labor movement) independent of and capable of going beyond those horizons (capable, for instance, of producing a class analysis of Stalinism).

6 Althusser (1976, 171; emphasis added) was concerned with “a relation of forces” in a “social process whose scope is obviously wider than any written text.” For him, theory could not exhaust (simply reflect in its essence and totality) this relation of forces; he operated not with “some belief in the omnipotence of theory, for which [he found himself] reproached by certain ‘headmasters’ of the school of philosophy, but on the contrary [with] the materialist knowledge of the weakness of theory left to itself, that is [with] the consciousness of the conditions of force which theory must recognize and to which it must defer if it is to have a chance of transforming itself into real power” (172). Working as a philosopher, as a producer of texts, he sought to give theory its specific and irreducible effectivity (“real power”) by finding ways of expressing its “relation of forces” quality within itself. This meant that theory could not simply refer to a “relation of forces” from the outside, as if it stood outside this relation and simply observed and reflected it; that theory had to be done rather mimetically, in a way that reproduced the practice of this relation within itself. Referring to Lenin (whose text in question constitutively participates in the relation of forces) as a source for his own theoretical practice, Althusser wrote: “In a written text like What is to be Done? the only form which relation of forces can take is its presence, its recognition and its anticipation in certain radical formulae, which cause the relation of forces between the new ideas and the dominant ideas to be felt in the very statement of the theses themselves” (171; emphasis added). It is thus clear that the rhetorical effect I have been highlighting is no mere adornment to Althusser’s practice of theory but is an integral part of it.

7 Althusser (1976, 169) lists three theses (the thesis of “theoretical practice,” the thesis of the “internal character of the criterion of validation of theoretical practice,” and the “thesis of Marx’s theoretical anti-humanism”) as “examples” of “radical theses” with such an immanent effect.

8 The bourgeois position in philosophy is constituted by a particular form of separation between theory and practice: it sees nothingness (nothing essential) between the Subject and “the world.” This nothingness can be understood as the condition of the philosophical certainty of a “Subject” that allows Capital to manage its “subjects” with cultural and political-juridical confidence. This certainty is possible only on the condition of a clean separation between the subject and the world, or theory and practice. It is this cleanliness that first produces philosophy as a conversation about the separateness of the subject and the world and then about the conditions (empiricism or rationalism) for their reunification, the reduction of one to the other. The whole of bourgeois philosophy, even at the limits (e.g., the case of Kant, who questioned the possibility of a reduction but did not question the vision of an essential separation of theory and practice, of reason and the world), can be seen as the problematic of the unity of theory and practice.

Althusser’s theses (see note 7 above) work exactly to contest the bourgeois nothingness between Subject and Object, to make this between an explorable, mappable space, and the very meaning of materialism can be explained in terms of this rejection of nothingness. The first thesis (“theoretical practice”), mixing “theory” and “practice,” jostled the structure of separation between the Subject and the world (by which the latter would come after but only so it would then conform to the former). With this thesis, far from abolishing the distinction between Subject/subjects and the world, between theory and practice, Althusser intended to challenge the bourgeois obliteration of the space between them. He did retain a separation between theory and practice (whether he should have retained the terms themselves is an interesting question), but he did so in a way that made a clean separation between them (and, thereafter, the philosophical reduction of one to the other) impossible (that, at least, was the intent). The second and third theses in his bag of exemplary radical theses were attempts to fill the new philosophical space his first thesis (the very expression “theoretical practice”) suggested: the second thesis (the “internal character of the criterion of validation of theoretical practice”) with the possibility of considering theory in terms of its own practices; the third thesis (“Marx’s theoretical anti-humanism”) by freeing the world (the real concrete humans, for example, that Marx described in the historical and empirical parts of Capital) to exist in its concreteness (materiality) in excess of bourgeois idealist generalizations.

9 The trope of “paradox” was not unique to Althusser in 1960s France. An explicitly philosophical use of the trope was made by Derrida (see Garver 1973). The association of Althusser with Derrida can to some degree be discussed in terms of the influence the Algerian war of independence against French imperialism had on the French intellectual scene. In contradistinction to a German reliance on Reason (leading either to hope, as with Lukács-Hegel, or to despair, as with the Frankfurt School), the French, confronting the “othering techne” of Reason—“One of the functions of racism is to compensate the latent universalism of bourgeois liberalism: since all human beings have the same rights, the Algerian will be made a subhuman” (Sarte, quoted in Bhabha 2004, xxiv)—the French were led to a deconstruction of Reason as such: a discovery of and openness to a multiplicity of “logics … imbricated within reason” (Young 2004, 39). The turn to the effective (“psycho-effective”) powers of the tropes of paradox and surprise by Derrida and Althusser (both had direct links to the events in Algeria) can thus perhaps best be understood as originating in the context of a struggle against imperialism in which the possibilities for another world seemed blocked within the discredited horizons of Reason. So blocked by the geography of Reason, the possibilities for change could seem real (a precondition for hope and action) psycho-emotively and promptable by a certain use of words. Franz Fanon (quoted in Bhabha 2004, xxv), who was even more compellingly formed by the Algerian struggle than either Derrida or Althusser, described his own prose as having the power “to touch [his] reader affectively … For me,” he continued, “words have a charge. I find myself incapable of escaping the bite of a word, the vertigo of a question-mark.” Althusser himself well understood and played with this biting power of words. When, having himself characterized his own formulations as seemingly “paradoxical and even theoretically provocative,” he wrote that his proposal of “the category of theoretical practice … [had been] scandalous in some people’s eyes” (Althusser 1976, 169; emphasis added), he was, I think, only showing rhetorical surprise (feigning to be surprised by the presence of the very “scandal” that his “paradoxical and even provocative” thesis had in fact meant to generate).

10 Althusser (1976, 172) identified the method of extremism as characteristic not just of (his) Marxist philosophy but of philosophy proper: “This relation of force, counter-bending and bending, this extremism in the formulation of theses, belongs quite properly to philosophy, and … the great philosophers always practiced it.” The point was thus not to put out a call for an entirely new way of practicing philosophy—for such practice was in effect already (at least in the case of “great philosophers,” presumably even idealist ones)—but for philosophy to become cognizant of this practice as the norm, as opposed to the conventional norm that “only requires a straight, true idea in order to correct a bent, false idea” (171) and to be changed by this cognition.

11 “In bending the stick in the opposite direction, you run a risk: of bending it too little, or too much, the risk which every philosopher takes. Because, in this situation, in which social forces and interests are at stake, but can never be untangled with absolute certainty, there is no court of final appeal” (Althusser 1976, 172). It is quite clear here that the category of “error” has more than just a theoretical dimension. Just like the power of a philosophical matrix is constituted in reference to the relation of “forces” that make the theoretical field (in this case, a philosophical field) of battle what it is in a particular conjuncture, so too can “error” be seen as constituted in relation to these forces. The war of position requires that risks be properly assessed, that alliances (linkages to intellectual trends) be strategically considered, weaknesses identified, and points of attack chosen, and these assessments, considerations, identifications, and choices all depend on the state of the struggle within and without the field of theory. Althusser’s work simply cannot be understood if extracted from his analyses of the relation of forces as he saw them shaping the “Labour Movement.” The risks and the errors are thus only ever meaningful by reference to a state of the class struggle.

12 The most significant and enduring misreading pertains to Althusser’s thesis of “Marx’s theoretical anti-humanism.” Far from representing a movement away from human experiences (real humans “as they really are” in their material relations, yes, but also in their dilemmas, desires, and hopes), for Althusser (who in this respect arguably produced the first real “development” of Marxist thought after Gramsci), Marx’s anti-humanism was rather a theoretical pris-de-conscience necessary to free and thus bring to light these experiences from a variety of theoretical straightjackets. He writes, “Capital is full of the suffering of the exploited … and it is written for the purpose of helping to free them [emphasis added] from class servitude. This … obliges [Marx] to abstract from concrete individuals and to treat them theoretically as ‘supports’ of relations, and this in the same work, Capital, which analyses the mechanisms of their exploitation” (Althusser 1976, 200). Earlier in “Is it Simple … ?,” Althusser referred to “the thesis of Marx’s theoretical anti-humanism [as a] precise thesis, but one whose precise meaning some people did not want to understand” (170). He declined to discuss at any length the source of this “not wanting to understand” (he focused instead on the general “cries of dogmatism, speculation, scorn for practice, for the concrete, for man, etc.” that met his theses), and he limited himself to hinting at a certain “manifest ignorance” that he could “at a proper time” attribute to his critics. But it is not too difficult to surmise what the explicit line of his argument would have been: that his critics, simply refusing to “see” the distinction between “man” and “concrete men” (sticking mechanically, that is, to the bourgeois filter of “man”), had jumped too quickly (i.e., in an unscholarly way, insofar as they had failed to heed or even notice the thesis’s discussion of the indirect relationship between abstract and concrete) and thus had erroneously translated a criticism of “man” into a distaste for “men.”

13 Balibar (2006, 382) wrote that Althusser was “forced” to engage in self-criticism for his “theoreticism.” Balibar characterized this self-criticism as an “apparently regressive, even destructive, exercise” and posited the interesting evolution of the later Althusser (contingency, or aleatory materialism, and the materiality of ideology) as something that occurred in spite of (“nonetheless”) this “destructive exercise.” It seems to me, however, that the moment of self-criticism, forced on him as it might have been, was a condition of the further development of Althusser’s thought. An element of force is necessarily inscribed in the playbook of theory if theory is understood as a battleground, and the further development of the elements of the materialist position in philosophy that Althusser produced required a cutting down to size of the autonomy Althusser had (for good reasons in his work in the 1960s) assigned to “theory.” This cutting down to size did not involve a weakening of concepts (the “problematic” of Reading Capital or the concept of “generalities”) whose task had been to produce a kind of Kuhnian representation of Marxist “science.” It rather involved a recognition of the inability of theory in itself to define the terms of theoretical practice (an inability which had in any case been implicitly recognized in Althusser’s principled critique of Hegelian totality). Also see note 6 above.

14 Balibar (2006) presents this context as one of intense but hopeful tensions within the communist movement, characterized by the deep problems of what was soon to be known as “real socialism” on the one hand, but also by anti-imperialist struggles around the world on the other. As is well known, Althusser’s work was a project to enable the philosophical framework of Marxism to face seriously (theoretically and philosophically, so as to have a chance to resolve) the Stalinist dead end. By contrast, the context in which Resnick, working with Richard Wolff, came to adopt the Althusserian project was one of political weakness for a traditional Left unable to rise to the challenge posed by the emergence of sites of struggle (gender, race, alienation) it had either neglected or subordinated. Resnick’s was a project, structured through the openings Althusser had already either created or suggested, to reset theoretically (and philosophically) the relationship of class to these and, in principle, any other sites of struggle.

15 What I write below about Stephen Resnick’s attitudes toward theory and risks can thus also directly apply to Richard Wolff’s. What I write about Resnick’s personal route to those strategies and risks can similarly apply to Wolff’s, but obviously only in the broad terms of a general stance of a “being other” to bourgeois knowledge, not in terms of concrete biography. More on this in note 20 below.

16 “Instincts” are what Althusser (1971, 12) invoked as a necessary element for the revolution in theory (against bourgeois hegemony) that he and Resnick practiced: “It is not easy to become a Marxist-Leninist philosopher. Like every ‘intellectual,’ a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite … To become ‘ideologists of the working class’ (Lenin), ‘organic intellectuals’ of the proletariat (Gramsci), intellectuals have to carry out a radical revolution in their ideas: a long, painful and difficult re-education. An endless external and internal struggle … Proletarians have a ‘class instinct’ [emphasis added] which helps them on the way to proletarian ‘class positions.’ Intellectuals, on the contrary, have a petty-bourgeois class instinct which fiercely resists this transition.”

17 A continuity of purpose and a commitment to an overarching thread (here, “class”) is something that an early (before the events of 1968) collaborator of Althusser suggests we should assume when looking at an oeuvre (as we are now doing, even if only sketchily, with Resnick): “I have not bowed to the propriety that distinguishes between the recognized and the disavowed works of a given author, or makes allowances for such circumstances as youth and maturity. Precautions and retractions may attest to an author’s courage and prudence. The fact remains that any mode of thinking that is the least bit singular reveals itself in always saying basically the same thing, which it cannot but hazard every time in the colorful prism of circumstances. Contrary to what interested parties might say, only imbeciles ever truly change, since they alone are free enough regarding all thought to feel at home in any particular mode of thinking” (Rancière 2003, xxviii).

18 In psychoanalytic terms, it could be said that in its status as a concept that is subject to the law of Reason (and the academy), class could function as a symptom of the neurotic conditions produced by the hegemony of the bourgeois Subject. As such a symptom, it cannot be entirely repressed. But it can be managed, contained, marginalized, controlled, and perhaps even cherished for its jouissance value: the reassurance that the bourgeois Subject—its culture, that is—may get from testing and validating its ability to manage the painful eruptions of class.

19 Resnick’s real-moment encounter with the Althusserian project to produce a specifically Marxist concept of class came through Richard Wolff, who visited the French philosopher in the late 1970s. Resnick and Wolff saw this threshold-crossing opportunity in the conceptual sense of “seeing” that Althusser himself (in Reading Capital) had seen Marx crossing: they saw it, and they could only see it because they, or something in them, aspired to it and because they were willing to upturn enough soil to unearth it.

20 The biographical portrait of Stephen Resnick I have laid out is sketchy, but it does have a theoretical motivation. Just as there is no Marxist practice of theory outside of time and place (as we have seen, a role for the class struggle in the production of concepts—that is, materialism—requires the specificity of time and place), so there is no “Marxist” interpellation outside of biography: “There is an irreducible autobiographical flavor to a Marxist’s explanation of his/her choice of entry-point or, for that matter, his/her commitment to … the Marxist theoretical tradition … To imagine that autobiography is not enough, that theoretical commitments must be warranted by some ‘objectively’ existing ranking of importance, correctness, or essentiality is to miss precisely what distinguishes overdetermination from essentialism” (i.e., materialism from bourgeois idealism; Resnick and Wolff 1985, xxix). I hope my biographical sketch of Stephen Resnick has succeeded in suggesting an “irreducible otherness” to bourgeois conventions of being on his part: only such irreducible otherness can explain his felt need, with respect to class, to go beyond the politics of the circulation of concepts and broach the politics of the production of concepts. I believe that a similar relationship of otherness can be postulated for those two of Resnick’s comrades in interpellation that I have had occasion to mention: Richard Wolff and Althusser himself. This “otherness” is not something that lends itself to being fully understood as a matter of content only. It is also a matter of style and form—hence my references to styles and instincts in discussions of Althusser and Resnick. Althusser’s intense personal relation to style can perhaps be best documented (restricting the terrain of insight to his publications) with his own autobiographical writings, the two versions of which (the first just one year after “Is it Simple ..?,” in 1976, called The Facts; the second in 1985, The Future Lasts Forever, after the 1980 homicidal tragedy) were both written in registers that spill over the biographical norm: “The Facts belongs to the comic, and The Future Lasts Forever to the tragic mode, situating them outside the scope of binary criteria, such as truth and falsehood, which biography is obliged to delineate” (Corpet and Boutang 1992, 8). Resnick also had an intense personal relationship to style: his formulations (in his teaching and in his writing) were sharp: sharp not as in “clear,” though they were that too, but sharp as in intellectually (never personally) provocative and shocking. His formulations about overdetermination (more on this below) arguably have this quality of sharpness overflowing their analytical content.

21 Laying out an assessment of his own work, Althusser (1976, 173; emphasis added) wrote that “to be able to explain I needed the perspective of time—not just a ten years interval, but the experience of the effects caused by my writings, of further work and of self-criticism. It has been written: you need to understand. I would add: especially to understand what you yourself have written.” Of course, the passage here is not about chronological time but the time of the class relations of forces in which theory operates (see note 11). It is too bad that Resnick did not have the time to assess his own work from the perspective of time, or if he did, then the time to write it out. The rest of this essay is partly my own way of placing a necessary assessment on the agenda of a tribute to Resnick. I do not know what Resnick’s overall self-assessment was or might have been or what he would have thought of the terms of my assessment. But of course that is not what matters. What matters for his legacy is that an assessment in relation to the current state of class struggles be placed on the agenda (the plural “struggles” is itself the result of the theoretical revolution Resnick and Wolff produced: before that revolution, the form would have been singular).

22 The bourgeoisie did achieve a certain closure, but it never did so by virtue of philosophy; the closure, suturing, always required the codetermining multiplicity and fluidity of other processes—political, economic, cultural, etc. It consequently never did achieve closure with the totalizing effect that the hegemony of the Subject posited. This last point, that the bourgeois Subject never achieved totality, not that it never achieved closure, is, I think, the meaning of Gibson-Graham (2006a [1996]).

23 To be clear, Resnick and Wolff’s structure of overdetermination, intending as it does to overturn the traditional distinction between knowing/epistemology and being/ontology, contains within itself the element of knowledge: the historically fluid, ever-changing sites and practices that constitute the world are overdetermined by knowledge points and processes. The question of agency, however, even if it can be linked to (questions of) knowledge, is not reducible to it. This is not only because agency can be linked to processes other than just the knowledge process but is also—and for us more pertinently—because it refers to elements of consciousness and volition (elements which, of course, here need to be placed in their proper, nonbourgeois, philosophical-psychoanalytical matrix).

24 It is possible of course to imagine a pure framework of contingency, to have the concept of overdetermination—that is, at least as Resnick used it—without introducing any determining role for agency, a kind of pure, abstract, postmodernism. But if the gist of what I have written here about Resnick is correct, his interest was not and could not have been in any such pure framework.

25 In the current division of mental and manual (i.e., practical) labor, any philosophical pretension of determinism that fixes a center-essence to be “discovered” conceptually has an inevitable effect of placing theorists (“intellectuals [who] have a petty-bourgeois class instinct which fiercely resists [the] transition” to “organic intellectuality”—see note 16 above) in a position of privilege in the struggle against capitalism. I am not aware of Resnick putting matters directly and explicitly in these terms, but his categorical embrace of overdetermination should be understood as the result of an intuition of this academy-privileging effect of philosophical determinism (essentialism).

26 A remarkable exploration here is the one building on and/or connecting strategically with the theoretical revolution of Resnick and Wolff, with the reconceptualization of communism carried out by them (Resnick and Wolff 2002) and by some of their students and grand-students. See the work of Özselçuk and Madra (2005), that of Chakrabarti, Dhar, and Cullenberg (2012): on these see Callari (2016).

27 To be clear, this is not to diminish in any way the potent role that the concept of overdetermination played in the revolution. The reconceptualization of class processes that Resnick and Wolff (1987) carried out, and which could not have been carried out or even conceived without the framework of overdetermination, is nothing short of remarkable. The risks at hand pertain rather to the effects of a relative undertheorization of the problematic of agency (to which, indeed, the concept of a “point of entry” alludes): effects on politics (how to reconstruct the movement against capitalist exploitation) and effects on theory (including on the concept of overdetermination itself—see note 29 below).

28 It is exactly on these grounds that Althusser (1970, 114; also see note 29) considered Gramsci as the only Marxist after Lenin’s time and up to his own time to have made a theoretical contribution, to have broken new ground.

29 It was toward such an understanding that a different use of the concept of overdetermination (different from that of Resnick and Wolff’s use), analytically structured in analogy to Freud’s (1938) own use of the term and pointing to conjunctural possibilities for a transformation of social agency (and to the structured political work necessary to effect it), could arguably be thought of as necessary.

30 Resnick volunteered this element of “self-criticism” during a private conversation (this one in Newton, Massachusetts, over lunch) in which we discussed his work on the U.S.S.R. (Resnick and Wolff 2002).

31 I have already mentioned Özselçuk and Madra (2005), and Chakrabarty, Dhar, and Cullenberg (2012). To these can be added Amariglio and Callari (1989), Callari and Ruccio (2010), DeMartino (2003), and J. K. Gibson-Graham (2006b), all of which move within the orbit of theoretical practice. Notable and remarkable in the out-of-academia legacy of Resnick are the works of the Gibson-Graham inspired Community Economies Collective and Research Network (http://www.communityeconomies.org/Home), that of Richard Wolff’s Democracy at Work initiative (http://www.democracyatwork.info), and of David Ruccio’s popular blog (https://anticap.wordpress.com).

32 See Althusser (1976, 168–9). Instructive in this respect is Grahame Lock’s introduction to Althusser (1976), which lays out the political consequences of the theoretical impasse of the economism-humanism couplet that Althusser thought straitjacketed Marxism and the labor movement and that thus explains Althusser’s sense of the practical political value of his intervention.