Listen Marxist!

When I was in graduate school back in the day we regularly ran into Tom Frank and his Baffler groupies down Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap. When Thomas Frank broke into the mainstream, none of us were terribly surprised. He has a nice sense for the ironies of US history. Listen Liberal or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? is a good example.

Nevertheless, whether in Kansas, or in Washington, or no longer in Washington, Frank leaves us wondering: why did all of this happen?

Republicans believe they know why it happened. It happened because centrally controlled economies are inefficient. It happened because centrally controlled economies let down the very people they aim to be helping, working families. And it happened because the Democrats only insight over the past century, tax and spend liberalism, failed. Once Democrats realized this they tried to convince voters that they too were free market liberals. It didn’t work.

Marxists also have an explanation for why this happened. It begins with Frank’s analysis — Democrats left labor behind — but it then faults democrats for failing to adopt a class-based analysis or a coherent critique of capital. You cannot at the same time support both capital and labor, which is precisely what the democrats seek to do. Their answer is to organize working families to oppose capital.

Yet, for much the same reason Frank’s argument fails to satisfy, neither does the mainstream Marxist argument. Both lack a working class eager to hear what they are saying. Frank’s Kansas has not budged at all since 2007. In the November 2020 election working families preferred Trump to Biden. Neither Frank nor mainstream Marxists offer us a coherent explanation for why this is so.

Mainstream Marxism is what I call the mostly class-based critique of capital. It is far from monolithic. Somewhat surprisingly, however, mainstream Marxism has at its core a practical rejection of dialectical materialism. History simply has not cooperated in the way mainstream Marxists had hoped it would. Culturally, workers are overwhelmingly conservative. More often than not they side with capital, even against their own interests. (Witness the large red stain running north to south, east to west, in the center of any electoral map since well before “bleeding Kansas.”) It is for this reason that mainstream Marxists migrated during the 1940s away from dialectical materialism towards what could be called political materialism. In political materialism, politics holds priority over history, as in this quote from Analles scholar Fernand Braudel:

A third sector should be added to the pre-industrial model — that lowest stratum of the non-economy, the soil into which capitalism thrusts its roots but which it can never really penetrate. This lowest layer remains an enormous one. Above it, comes the favoured terrain of the market economy, with its many horizontal communications between the different markets: here a degree of automatic coordination usually links supply, demand and prices. Then alongside, or rather above this layer, comes the zone of the anti-market, where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates. This — today as in the past, before and after the industrial revolution — is the real home of capitalism.

Braudel, Wheels of Commerce pp. 229-230

Not the market, but the anti-market, drives history. Countering this anti-market, however, is what mainstream Marxists count as authentic human, or “species,” being. This authentic human being has been subverted by capital. It has been forced to become something it is not. Inauthentic human being counts money, labor, and land as commodities, when, in fact, they are fictitious commodities. They are not natural. They are constructions. As a consequence, the social being structured around these fictitious commodities is no longer dialectical, but simply oppositional, a victim of what Karl Polanyi calls the double movement.

Let me first acknowledge that this is a gross misreading of Marx’s mature thought. In his mature writings Marx argued that the dialectic arises out of the two-fold form of the commodity, whose particular surface forms of appearance are valued in terms of an abstract value that governs social relations not in particular, but universally. The difference between outward forms of appearance and abstract value leaves open the possibility, but only the possibility of crises. At these moments, this difference, which almost always operates unseen, comes into the open. Nevertheless, even when it does, it does not come with its own operations manual. More often than not, therefore, crises are resolved, and the difference between particular surface forms and abstract value once again retreats into the background.

To say that these mutually independent and antithetical processes form an internal unity is to also that their internal unity moves forward through external antitheses. These two processes lack internal independence because they complement each other.  Hence, if the assertion of their external independence proceeds to a certain critical point, their unity violently makes itself felt by producing — a crisis. There is an antithesis, immanent in the commodity, between use-value and value, between private labour which must simultaneously manifest itself as directly social labour, and a particular concrete kind of labour which simultaneously counts as merely abstract universal labour, between the conversion of things into persons and the conversion of persons into things; the antithetical phases of the metamorphosis of the commodity are the developed forms of motion of this immanent contradiction. These forms therefore imply the possibility of crises, though no more than the possibility.  For the development of this possibility into a reality a whole series of conditions is required, which do not yet even exist from the standpoint of the simple circulation of commodities

K Marx, Capital I.I.3 §2 (a).

Such was the case from 1929 to 1968, when the abstract value credited to commodities proved to be completely out of touch with the material forms of appearance of these commodities. Eventually, it would take $4.7T public appropriations beginning in 1938 to erase the gulf between surface forms of appearance and the abstract values that mediate these social forms universally. That is what the US Congress appropriated to defeat Germany and Japan. By 1968, however, this Keynesian “multiplier” had run its course. And by then everyone had forgotten precisely why so much wealth had been in circulation for the past forty years. Nevertheless, right on schedule, surface forms of appearance began once again to pull free from the abstract value that accounted for their social relations to one another.

By then, however, mainstream Marxists had fully bought into political materialism. The long upturn, as Robert Brenner has called it, was entirely a product of the political militancy of the working class. They had demanded and received higher wages and better benefits. They had fought for and won the right to organize. It was their militancy that throughout the 1950s and 1960s won civil rights for women and minorities, and that had expanded the social and political franchise. The US Congress’ $4.7T had nothing at all to do with it.

But this means that, for mainstream Marxists, the solution to what for working families has now been a steady sixty year decline must be in politics. So much for the dialectic.

If, by contrast, we begin instead with Marx’s mature analysis, we can see that just as the long upturn from 1938 to 1968 was grounded in commodity production and exchange, so the long downturn beginning in 1968 is also grounded in the two-fold character of the commodity. Even if we were able to restore something like the New Deal, that too would also be grounded in the commodity. But how might this analysis take us any further than the analysis offered by Frank or by mainstream Marxists?

The commodity, as explained by Marx, invites commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism ascribes transcendental, quasi-universal powers to the surfaces of things, which these surfaces do not actually possess. Nevertheless, commodities do possess transcendental, quasi-universal powers insofar as they are valued in terms of the abstract value possessed by all commodities under capitalism. To put names on these fetishes, abstract value, $4.7T of it, purchased health, job security, education, political power, and social security for millions of Americans from 1938 to 1968. And, yet, because the powers these things exercised were separated, both in experience and analytically, from the abstract value by which they were underwritten, working families could believe that these things themselves had power apart from US Congressional taxation and distribution. Moreover, it was not only working families who operated under this illusion. It was mainstream Marxists themselves who came to believe that these commodities had appeared on account of their political militancy. In fact, the reverse was true. Their political militancy was itself among the commodities purchased with the $4.7T. Take away that $4.7T, which is what happened beginning in 1968, and that political militancy will also disappear. I guarantee it.

But the fetish will not disappear. This explains why working families will work themselves to the bone in order to deprive themselves of health, education, and welfare; this explains why working families will also fetishize the surface forms of people of color, immigrants, women and Muslims, all of whom are credited with far more power than these surfaces themselves warrant.

The crises to which Marx referred in volume one of capital are all around us; but not in such a manner that they wear their meanings on the surface. To the contrary, the commodity loudly calls attention to its surfaces, but not to the abstract value underlying these surfaces.

So, Listen Marxist! If we may ever expect to adequately diagnose and seek to overcome the crisis that fills our world today, it cannot be grounded in political materialism. It will only arise from a sober and careful analysis of the commodity and its fetish.

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