To continue my critique of grad school, knowledge production and why I’m participating in it…

How did we get this way?

I subscribe to Perry Anderson’s view on this. In Considerations on Western Marxism, he points out that the first few generations of socialists weren’t academics. They were active participants in the revolutionary movements of their time. They were educators, sure – in party schools. Working class social movements formed their own institutions of learning and culture. These schools and associations drew thousands of workers together, on picnics, to meeting halls, to camps, to debate philosophy, science and the workers’ movement. Revolutionary theory wasn’t a history lesson: it was a debate on tactics, in the here and now.

The revolutionary teachings of Lindsey Naigle

The wave of revolutionary movements that peaked in 1919 – 1921 (all over the world, not just in Europe) was followed by a nadir of defeats and the rise of fascism. Socialists in fascist countries had to flee; Stalinism physically obliterated critical Marxism in the USSR. Gramsci is a good transitional figure for this period: he was both a leader of the Italian Communist Party, and someone who suffered the direct blows of retrenchment, as he languished and eventually perished in a fascist jail. His work is a testament to how grimly he clung to his practice, and theorized fascist repression in light of his experience as a revolutionary. Walter Benjamin killed himself rather than face a similar fate at the hands of the Nazis. Franz Jakubowski died in a concentration camp. Victor Serge was exiled to the Russian steppes, and would have died there without the intervention of the independent French left.

Tragic enough in their own right, these agonies were common enough: the entire European workers’ movement went down to defeat, torn apart by capitalist depression, fascist barbarity and Stalinist betrayal. With no workers’ movement, the refugee socialists went into the academy. Inside, they theorized their own defeat. The Frankfurt School’s work on the palliative impact of mass culture was one of the results.

When academic Marxism wasn't possible - singing The Internationale for a fallen comrade in Ken Loach's Land and Freedom

Subsequent generations of socialist intellectuals have never regained a substantive link with the movement that spawned them. Individual intellectuals have been exemplary in their activism, but the fact remained that there was no mass movement to orient towards. Apart from brief upsurges in the 1960s, the intellectual layers who had been part of, and came from, the workers’ movement (in terms of their theoretical origins, irregardless of their class position), continued a rarified life of their own, leading to the strange phenomenon where theorists of world revolution remain in universities, far removed from the world.

What the postmodernists get right

Given these circumstances, it’s no surprise that structuralism, post-structuralism, and finally postmodernism would take hold of the intellectuals. Theory that started with why mass social change failed to happen, moved inexorably to why it wouldn’t happen. From why social agents had failed, academics theorized why social agents couldn’t even exist in the first place.

I won’t casually dismiss generations of radical scholarship. Along the way, leftist intellectuals gained genuine insights into capitalist society. They developed a sophisticated understanding of ideology and culture. The way media, the state, and common sense interact to produce subservience to capitalist order poses important questions, not answered by crude Marxist appeals to false consciousness.

People who are being screwed over often fight back - anti-colonial demonstrator, The Battle of Algiers

However, I often disagree with the answers. For example, I find Chomsky taken up in a way that suggests workers are ideologized, and it’s up to enlightened intellectuals to bring the truth to the masses. This elitist vision of social change washes over the real insights working people have into their exploitation – as they should have, given they’re the ones being exploited. It also ignores the ways working people resist capitalism in a myriad of ways, both spontaneously and organized.

I link this assumption of passivity directly to the isolation of radical intellectuals from a mass workers’ movement. In the latter’s absence, it takes a keen intellect and unwavering commitment to radical social change, to seek out what resistance does exist and learn from it. Some intellectuals can do this, but not many.

And I’m not writing off non-radicals, either. As I said in my last post, all of us, even (particularly?) the intellectuals, are products of bourgeois society, and when there’s no mass movement to participate in, reformist ideology isn’t lazy thinking – in some key ways, it corresponds to the lived existence of capitalism. My Marxist academic friend said that being a Marxist is akin to being mentally ill, and I agree: you’re dissociated from how 99% of people see the world. Talk of resistance and change makes little sense when people are trying to hang on to what they have.

Marge, this bourgeois economic science is making a lot of sense!

The ebb of class struggle, and the agonizingly slow process of left recomposition, is not the sole product of bad Marxism, any more than postmodernism is just bad social theory. Capitalism has changed, and the pomos have identified a key moment in this process: the end of fixed exchange rates, the advent of post-fordism, the rise of financial capital. Fordism, of course, hasn’t gone away: the working class, organized in factories, is bigger now than it has ever been. But it’s dispersed, particularly throughout the global south. 50% of workers in Canada and the U.S. are in the service sector. The term ‘post-industrial’ leads to all sorts of fantasies about a ‘knowledge-based economy’ freed from material labour (and as a former secretary, I can vouch that knowledge work is damn material.) But capitalist restructuring and technological revolutions have changed work, where we live, the increasingly private consumption of culture, and the destruction of public social spaces and the creation of online ones. The challenge for Marxism is to take up these insights and incorporate them.

Why Marxism is still relevant

What seems screamingly obvious to me, is that a) postmodernists have come up with the wrong explanations to these real phenomena, and b) these changes can only be understood through a Marxist analysis. It does not follow that, because most workers in developed countries don’t wear overalls, therefore the working class has ceased to exist. Anyone who thinks so betrays their complete ignorance of Marxism, which is a science of the relations of production – how people work, the way it’s organized, not just the type of work they’re doing. In fact, Marx speaks very clearly in Capital about

- the constant need for capitalists to revolutionize the means of production through the introduction of technology;
- how this creates massive changes in work organization, and
- the subsequent effects on working class life as a whole


Capital still exists to buy labour power, whether that labour is mental or manual. Without the extraction of value by the capitalist class, capitalism grinds to a halt. The capital-labour contradiction defines capitalism, be it unionized workers fighting for a better contract or mothers fighting for universal child care. If some have bid farewell to the working class – or even history itself – that’s not the Marxists’ fault. As the sociologist Himani Bannerji says, most people who criticize Marx haven’t even read him. Most anti/non-Marxist intellectuals have taken a single version of Marxism (usually a Stalinized one), written it off, and generalized that to write off all Marxism as totalizing, tyrannical, or impossible.

That I feel this is unfair, arrogant and poor scholarship is, despite my tone here, besides the point. They’re losing the very tools they need to understand capitalism, at a time when capitalism prides itself on having no enemies (other than the terrorists, who are quite useful.) As an example of Marxists taking up the postmodern challenge, and using Marxism to understand society in complex ways, I refer people to David Harvey, Mike Davis and David McNally (hmm, all Davids), for starters. They start from the possibility that, as the capital-labour nexus is still with us, class struggle is inherent in capitalism. Gaining a clear vision of capitalism is part of resistance - which is the only reason to be a Marxist.

Why culture is worth studying, depending how you do it

This goes for my favourite shibboleth, cultural studies. I’ve struggled with the inanities of postmodern cultural analysis, when it leaves out any points of reference beyond ‘the text’ itself. But, just like it’s a mistake for pomos to abandon materialist tools when understanding capitalist change, it’s a mistake for Marxists to abandon art in the same process. Culture and art are reflections and products of the base & superstructure. They’re the triumph of a bourgeoisie masking its exploitation through abstractions, tools in the class war, and signifiers of cultural development as a whole. Trotsky writes in Literature and Revolution,

The texture of culture is woven at the points where the relationships and interactions of the intelligentsia of a class and of the class itself meet. The bourgeois culture… was developed by the interaction of the bourgeoisie and its inventors, leaders, thinkers and poets. The reader created the writer and the writer created the reader. This is true in an immeasurably greater degree of the proletariat, because its economics and politics and culture can be built only on the basis of the creative activity of the masses.

Workers are often creative in innovate ways

This is the root of my critique of art – not that it’s unimportant, but that it’s studied in a way that makes it unimportant. Let’s study everything from painting to video games, from raves to Burning Man. But let’s do it from those points of intersection: how art and culture are grounded in class relationships, situated in productive relations, and products themselves of struggle or its absence. Let’s connect art to life, and in so doing remove it from the exclusive domain of artists, and bring it back to “the creative activity of the masses”, where art links with economics, politics and social change.

What role for Marxist academics?

Other than constant existential crises? I think it’s key to have goals outside of academia – external reference points to orient one’s studies. I mean this systematically. It’s not enough to take up certain questions in one’s work – what is ideology? What’s happening in Iraq? - though those are important in of themselves. These questions have to be integrated into a revolutionary analysis and practice. Marxists have to see themselves as part of a broader struggle. I’ll refer to a document I’m still learning from, the Fourth International 2003 convention theses. The FI, a worldwide grouping of revolutionary organizations, strategizes the rebirth of anti-capitalism in the following way:

The new historical period of capitalism and revolutionary socialist struggle will call for a genuine programmatic refoundation, which will take the full measure of the structural, social and cultural upheavals both within capitalism and among the exploited classes and oppressed layers. This refounded programme… will take account of the current state of consciousness among the popular masses and link up with their demands and modes of action and organization.

You don't have a revolutionary programme yet? Shame on you! - Yu Rong Guang as Iron Monkey

Marxists must try, as much as possible, to orient their studies to praxis: make their theory contribute to the practice of rebuilding revolutionary movements worldwide. As specific, and historically grounded a task this is, there’s still no recipe:

It will not be the result of a hurried, academic exercise…. A vast, free discussion, collective elaboration, ‘globalized’ common work, critical and self-critical debate, and openness to ongoing and future social experiences will all be necessary.

As a Marxist grad student, my task is to contribute to this process. I can’t escape alienated labour, but at least I can use the opportunities being a student opens up to guide my research towards practical aims. And as for the rest of the bullshit, I can see it in its context – the reflections of awakening social movements, along with the foundering of decadent bourgeois thought incapable of resolving its own crises. I can encourage the first, and speed the death of the second. How this gets me through long, dark nights of the soul is anyone's guess. But I suppose my own activism - and having a Marxist blog - is part of the answer.