Location of our first meeting, the lovely Salisbury Hotel in North London

Reflections on the London Marxism Reading Group, Meeting I — July 9th, 2017

In order that the outcome and general themes of every month’s discussion should be freely accessible to everyone, especially the people who may have missed a meeting, I will write up brief summaries of the main points covered in each gathering. This is to help explain the ideas we discuss, outline their implications, and trace the development of our thinking over time.

In our first meeting on July 9th, we took the first, second and third chapters of Etienne Balibar’s The Philosophy of Marx as the starting point for a wide-ranging discussion. The conversation inevitably went in a number of different directions, not all of which were explored to their fullest extent; this is hard to avoid with a summary like Balibar’s of Marx’s whole work, which covers a huge variety of complex and engaging ideas. Nonetheless our conversation was highly productive and exciting. This was an excellent beginning for our group, but in the future we will try to choose material that focuses more intensely on an idea or cluster of ideas. Some ideas we might explore are related to the main points we touched upon, which are as follows:

  1. Marxism as a kind of anti-philosophy or nonphilosophy. Balibar asserts in the first few pages of The Philosophy of Marx that “philosophy” is not really the right way to describe Marx’s thinking, despite the title of his book. We could think in more detail about what this means. Is Marx a philosopher, or does he, as I tried to assert, utilise philosophical concepts and mechanisms to analyse what is often(though not solely) non-philosophical subject matter in a way that is analogous to philosophy but which also fundamentally goes against what some might call the premise of philosophy? In Marx’s thirteenth Theses on Feuerbach, he famously declares that “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it!This timeless formulation might be the basis for thinking of Marx as something other or more than a philosopher. He does not merely reflect; his philosophy demands a praxis, a way of interfering in the world rather than simply exploring it. It may make sense to call Marx’s thinking anti-philosophy then, not in the sense of being opposed to the practice of philosophy, or of having nothing to do with philosophy, but in being an inversion of philosophy. Like a mirror image, philosophy is not totally erased, but reflected back; recognisable, but with its assumptions turned upside-down. This would be an interesting thread to pursue, but might be left to the side for the time being while we address other concerns.
  2. The end of capitalism’s “productive” period and the shift towards a prolonged period of economic decline in which growth diminishes year by year. This is a process seen all over the world, and it underscores quite succinctly the argument that capitalism, in the long run, cannot sustain itself. Indeed, it pairs nicely with a key Marxist concept we did not address directly, that there is a tendency within capitalism for “the rate of profit to fall”. We might explore that idea more deeply, and think about the implications for global political and economic stability.
  3. One idea we did explore that follows from an acknowledgment that long-term economic growth has stagnated is the idea that labour has been steadily de-materialised. This concept can be formulated, and often is, as a reflection that “people don’t make things anymore”, but we took the idea much further than this. The focus of cultural attention, and of the investment of time, knowledge, money and other forms of capital, has become more and more ephemeral forms of economic activity. As I reflected during the discussion, for much of capitalism’s early period — from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the latter half of the 20th century — the focus was on invention of new commodities and physical technologies. Members of the middle class aspiring to be rich thought of themselves as inventors, and a whole class of part-time tinkerers in back-garden sheds existed to furnish the investor class with new ideas to explore and expand on. Such an economy gave us the early successes of the industrial cotton mills and continued through to the invention of other technologies that fundamentally changed how people relate to the world, such as the automobile. In the last few decades, however, those who aspire to greater lifestyles have shifted their focus from invention to speculation: playing the stock market, “flipping” real estate properties, and the creation of new immaterial digital-technology services(though this last category straddles the line). This has gone hand in hand with deindustrialisation in once-thriving factory regions and a general shift towards the financial, medical, academic, technology and service industries. Whether these industries “produce” anything is a somewhat moot point: some would argue their forms of production are as valid as traditional forms, but the point is that their production, if indeed it is production, is of a decidedly different nature. It is immaterial or less material, and has a corresponding effect on the labour that sustains it. Especially in latter end of the 2000s and in the 2010s, this cultural-economic tendency has reached new heights. More and more, people, especially young people, are being told that it is not only inevitable but liberatory to the human spirit that they should have no permanent, stable employment, but that they should be constantly juggling, throughout their lives, a series of immaterial, precarious forms of semi-employment. Uber, AirBnb, and other representatives of the “sharing” or “gig” economy are highly illustrative of this trend. We are being asked to think of ourselves as “creatives”, rather than “workers”, and in this way accept lower, less stable pay for work that blends in more and more seamlessly with life, threatening to erase this distinction entirely. All of this ties into the question of the declining rate of profit discussed previously: none of these forms of immaterial production — the creation of a new service app or new financial instrument — fundamentally open up new markets, which, as Marx said, was at one time(and ostensibly still is) a major driving force behind capitalist growth. All that the immaterial economy has been able to do is mine existing markets for deeper and deeper veins of wealth, steadily depleting the growth potential latent in the economy in the same way that relentless, desperate mining eventually exhausts an area of the Earth completely of its minerals. The question of declining growth, and how this is tied to increasing financialisation, automation and reliance on precarious labour in the service and technology industries is a huge one, and bears much greater exploration.
  4. Related to the de-materialisation of labour is the question of what effect this has on the ability of workers, once de-materialised, to organise as a class. The shift towards temporary work, or work that workers strive to make as temporary as possible(like working at McDonald’s), has done much to cut out the capacity for organisation from under the feet of workers. If one has no expectation of remaining in contact with their fellow workers, the impetus to organise is diminished(though some successful union struggles in the service industry have shown that it is not impossible). Also relevant to this are the ways in which the companies in the sharing/gig economy have used their status as “platforms” rather than “employers” to reduce workers to the status of “self-employed” dependent subjects, cut off from the ties of solidarity with other workers and told that they are now more free, while still being dependent on the whims of the capitalist market and on those who grant them the access to the networks(such as Uber’s platform) they need to sustain themselves. Shades of this process can also be seen throughout the freelance economy, in independent software programming, graphic design, writing, and other forms of “creative” labour in which individuals are cut off from other workers. All of this — the rise of temp labour, freelance labour, much of service industry labour — can be said to have had a very destructive effect on the capacity of workers to organise, and the question of how to overcome these challenges is a very important one.
  5. Reflecting on the decline in traditional kinds of production — heavy manufacturing industries — and on the de-materialisation of 21st-century labour has led many to proclaim the death of the “proletarian” as a meaningful category. The process of “de-proletarianisation” was a major subject of discussion. Millions of people in the West have, without a doubt, had their traditional status as proletarians called into question by the closure of factories. This has had a huge effect on our idea of the proletarian. While much industrial production has moved overseas, it was also pointed out that workers in countries such as India and China have also experienced the process of de-proletarianisation as factories close and jobs relocate. This de-proletarianisation therefore seems to be international, and corresponds to an overall shift towards automation, precariousness, and reliance on creative, service, and technology industries. Does this mean that traditional Marxist working-class organisation is now impossible? Assuming the answer is yes may rely on defining the proletarian subject and the proletarian’s relationship to capitalism in a certain way. Does labour have to be non-precarious, that is stable, in order to be proletarian? Does exploitation of a given worker by a given boss — a specific, interpersonal relationship of domination — have to exist in order for the proletarian to be oppressed in the classic Marxist fashion? Does it make sense to talk about the proletarian as being part of a stable, straightforward economy with a clearly defined protagonist and antagonist? In Marx and Engel’s formulation, workers were more fundamentally at the mercy of capitalism, the market, and the principle of competition as a whole than by any one capitalist, who would at some point fire that worker as surely as capitalism follows a boom-and-bust cycle driven by competition. In that sense, economies and employment have never been stable, and proletarians have never really been nine-to-five lifers who clock in at the same workplace every day for forty years — to be exploited, certainly, but exploited in a predictable and stable fashion. Perhaps it is this Fordist image of labour as a stable if unequal relationship — created by a half-century of strong union participation and a relative harmony between capital and labour — which is the real perversion of our understanding of labour, and perhaps it is only by returning to the idea of capitalist labour as being inherently precarious and uncertain that we can reclaim the proletarian as a meaningful concept, in direct opposition to the death knells which have been sounded for it. This is another huge topic that deserves detailed attention.
  6. It may not be immediately clear why it matters that there be a clear definition of what a proletarian is. Our final discussion segment went some way towards finding an answer to this question. One of the first things anyone interested in changing society has to do is gather others together to pursue this change. In order to do that, whether one thinks about this issue consciously or not, one has to think about who these people are, what they have in common, and why a given social change would be in their best interest. Often, because activists and idealists do not consider the question critically, people fall back on universalist rhetoric borne out of the Enlightenment to articulate the imagined community that would respond to their aims. In such imaginings, all people have the relevant traits in common by their very nature as citizens or human beings or whatever the term may be: either way, people are assumed to naturally have all the right things in common and to naturally seek togetherness with one another. A contention I made during the discussion is that this is not true. The history of failure to motivate the masses by appealing to their common humanity should illustrate how hollow such rhetoric sounds to most people, who simply cannot imagine how their interests could possibly be the same as those of people who look and speak totally differently, when the only commonality anyone emphasizes is their humanity. What we need is to be able to show people that what they have in common is a shared status of being subject to economic exploitation and domination by a property-owning class; that they live by selling their labour rather than owning capital, and that this is the site of political and social action. Only highlighting meaningful similarities of life will give people a real basis for mass action. This requires having a clear concept of the working class, and overcoming the historic challenges recently made to the concept of the proletarian by economic and social developments makes clarifying this concept very difficult, which is why people so often fall back on universalist narratives about citizenship and humanity. Nonetheless, I think that in order to have a functioning Marxist philosophy, much more work will have to be done in this area.

This concludes a reflection that turned out much longer than I expected it would be. Here’s hoping our next meeting is as productive as this one was.

N

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    We meet once a month(for now) and we talk about Marxism. It’s great fun, and all are welcome.

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