This blog entry is long, overly complex and of interest only to other academics. Which, ironically enough, is exactly why I have to write it. Please bear with me.

I had a great conversation with a fellow Marxist academic yesterday, in which I complained bitterly that I’m not meeting other Marxists in school. People aren’t even interested in refuting Marxism; it’s like it doesn’t exist. My analytical tools – modes of production, ideology, class struggle – have been replaced by play, problematizing and discursive practices.

I expected to feel like a freak at work. The Cold War, reformism and Stalinism eliminated Marxism from working class culture 50 years ago, and it hasn’t been reintroduced. But school, I thought, was the one place Marxists remained. Most Marxists I know have chosen academic careers, because university is the one place (in North America, at least) where radical ideas maintain a presence. That has huge contradictions – how do you empower working people to fight capitalist power from a campus office? – but at least the ideas are there, alive.

But so far, I’ve discovered they’re not. I seem to be surrounded by epiphenomena – ideas that I consider peripheral. Worse, those ideas are hard to ‘get’. At least with work, alienation was completely obvious. You can’t go to an office every day without feeling your labour power stripped away from you for someone else’s benefit. In academia, alienation expresses itself in the obscurity of the concepts.

'Oh, but embodiment is so May 2005.'

Grad school is alienated labour

The search for ‘unique contributions to knowledge’ is a large part of academic alienation. Students are expected to find knowledge on their own. The lived experience of most people is looked on with suspicion. Many forms of postmodernism make a virtue of that, by questioning the validity of the subject. Even when students have to immerse themselves in a particular field of knowledge, that field is itself just other academics, sequestered away from the world, counting angels on pinheads. Occasionally they get together, hold conferences and feel they’re contributing to knowledge because 300 other people are doing the same thing.

I don’t want to pick on postmodernists (at least, not exclusively!) I first encountered this in political science, where I learnt that mainstream liberals had taken the work of bourgeois forefathers like John Rawls & Richard Rorty, added their own nuance and published that as a new theory. Then other political scientists nuanced the nuances and did the same, etc. etc. Political science becomes a series of discrete conceptual spheres, all arguing with each other, all proceeding from the same, false premise.

This nitpicking isn’t the property of one field, but of academia as a whole. It’s the result of social knowledge divorced from the real practice of people – not as individuals, but as social forces. As soon as that link is lost, knowledge can be chopped up into infinitesimal pieces, rearranged and given a life of its own. Academics can flatter themselves that they’re discovering and refining the human existence, when they’re simply creating new layers of falsehoods.

I’ve quoted this before, I’m quoting it again. Franz Jakubowski on ideology:

The notion that individual spheres of thought and knowledge are independent of each other and of their socio-economic base is ideological…. Purely contemplative knowledge is ideological.

In the prison of bourgeois ideology

Knowledge can only be about reality. Reality is the complex interaction of the socio-economic base and what Jakubowski calls the ‘political-legal’ superstructure. If you separate your ideas from the study of that phenomenon – let’s call it class society – you create ideology, partial (and therefore false) visions of the world.

It is precisely this apparent autonomy of the superstructure which is the most important form of ideology.

Great. That separation isn’t just one form of ideology, it’s the most important. As an academic, I’m actively involved in one of the most important forms of falsification. Thanks Franz.

Ideological ‘sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and view of life’ [he’s quoting Marx], apparently detached from their material foundations, are not just subjective motivations for the actions of the individual man [sic – this goes for every other gendered reference I quote]; they also correspond, objectively, to his social being.

Jakubowski is being materialist, here. He’s saying exactly what gets grad students’ backs up: if we worked regular jobs, we wouldn’t have the time or inclination to create ideology. You can’t argue that work has disappeared and we spend our days frolicking in cyberspace when you’re making sandwiches for Subway. Our social position in the division of labour, as parasi… I mean, students, is why we create ideology. As Marx says in The German Ideology, “As soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape.” We can’t think like class conscious workers when we’re producing knowledge for a capitalist education system.

And anyway, Marx found the idea that we go off to our study carrels and produce knowledge, completely laughable: “The real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections.” We’re only in school because society produces a big enough surplus to support students, and the ruling class needs educated flunkies to justify its existence. The idea that I could march into academia and find eager revolutionaries ready to overturn the system is ridiculous: we’re all products of capitalism, shaped by the social division of labour that placed us here.

Some anti-capitalist practice I like - communist hip-hop group Gatas Parliament

I'm part of this like anyone else. One of the most pernicious features of school is that we think we’re above all that: we all believe we’re independent individuals, forming our own thoughts in distinction to everyone else. But the content of our alienated thought – communist, liberal, postmodernist – doesn’t really matter. As soon as we become students, mental labourers, knowledge producers, we’re part of the bourgeois separation between knowledge and social practice. We’re creating ideology. The idea that we can change the relations of knowledge production through force of will is an idealist fantasy.

Feeling Bolshie

I’ll end with a quote from Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Lenin’s often accused of being vulgar here; well, fair enough. It’s before he’s gone back to Hegel and rethought how ideas develop. But I understand and share his frustration:

The standpoint of life, of practice, should be first and fundamental in the theory of knowledge. And it inevitably leads to materialism, sweeping aside the endless fabrications of professorial scholasticism. Of course, we must not forget that the criterion of practice can never, in the nature of things, either confirm or refute any human idea completely. This criterion too is sufficiently ‘indefinite’ not to allow human knowledge to become ‘absolute’, but at the same time it is sufficiently definite to wage a ruthless fight on all varieties of idealism and agnosticism. (129)

Ideas have a life of their own; but that life isn’t independent of practice – by which Lenin means activist practice, aimed at changing the social relations of capitalism. Or, more prosaically, class struggle. Here’s what makes Lenin fun to read:

The sole conclusion to be drawn from the opinion held by Marxists that Marx’s theory is an objective truth is that by following the path of Marxian theory we shall draw closer and close to objective truth (without ever exhausting it); but by following any other path we shall arrive at nothing but confusion and lies. (130)

Fine, it’s a polemic. ‘Following a single path’ raises my hackles, too. But before I get accused of messianism, look carefully at what Lenin’s saying. He’s not saying ideas are useless, nor that we ever arrive at an ahistorical Marxist conclusion that settles the matter. He is saying that Marxism is the best method for understanding capitalism, because it’s based in practice. It doesn’t impose a neutral subject like liberalism, it doesn’t shy away from a systemic analysis like postmodernism.

Must... be... a crude materialist...

It’s very easy to say, ‘Well, the world’s changed, Marxism isn’t relevant anymore, revolution only creates tyranny, let’s get back to our niche knowledge production, where’s my Laclau & Mouffe?’ But I think Lenin’s right that a materialist, historical analysis of human society leads to Marxism; and that as soon as you confine yourself to alienated knowledge production, “confusion and lies” are inevitable.

Next blog entry: How did we get this way? What the postmodernists get right. Why culture is worth studying, depending how you do it. And more of the reductive analysis you’ve come to know and love.