A New Book on Marxism for Our Time
An excerpt from my Foreword to Flowers for Marx
Since the collapse of Sanders and Corbyn, the Western left has been thrown into a state of uncertainty. Should it continue to pursue a democratic socialist agenda, attempting to transform liberal capitalism from within? Or should it break with this, calling for revolt against a capitalist class unbowed by the movements of the past decade? In the new book Flowers for Marx four authors address this question by returning to Marx—or rather, by asking which Marx we should return to. Is Marx an inveterate democrat, whose work privileges the dignity of man above all? Or is he—as Louis Althusser once argued—the founder of a new science, incompatible with the shibboleths of liberal-capitalist society?
The book is edited by my comrade and colleague Conrad Hamilton, co-host of the new show on my Emancipations podcast called “The Archimedean Point” and he establishes an interesting polemic with Matt McManus on democratic socialism throughout the book, looking at Althusser and the humanism debate. Conrad has co-lead two study seminars with me on Althusser’s For Marx and Jameson’s The Political Unconscious. Ben Burgis weighs in with a strong defense of the historical materialism of analytic Marxist thinker G.A. Cohen, and MattMcManus defends liberal socialism and Rawls as an essential figure for socialism. Ernesto Vargas brings an international dimension to the book with an essay on Mexico and the class composition of the bourgeoisie and dynamics involved with development.
In my Foreword to Flowers for Marx I revisit the debates over humanism in the young Marx, looking specifically at the debates Marx had with liberals in his time and how the censorship complex of the state radicalized Marx towards very particular views on free speech and liberalism more generally. I then look at how censorship works on the left in today’s time given that the book Flowers for Marx was itself censored by a prior publisher.
In his seminar “The Other Side of Psychoanalysis” delivered in the wake of the May 1968 uprising in France, Jacques Lacan remarked that Hegel’s theory of history reveals that the position of mastery becomes the “cuckold of history.” This is an insight that Nietzsche had already intimated in his warning: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” In the dialectic of the censorship complex it is the censor that becomes the cuck of history, the hard kernel that undoes all pretense to liberation.
To free themselves from the ideological incoherence of this tie-up, I argue that Marxists must create a “counterpublic” — that is, a proletarian public sphere. Although this is not a concept from Marx — it emerges from Queer Theory in the 1980s — it is highly useful for understanding how to realize his insights into the abolition of censorship.
Here is an excerpt from my Foreword, please enjoy it and please buy the book!
“MARX’S RUPTURE WITH THE KANTIAN PUBLIC SPHERE”
How should we approach the thought of the young Marx, the budding revolutionary journalist, moving around between socialist parties not entirely sure of his political direction, and philosophically caught within the idealist trap of Ludwig Feuerbach? There has been a tendency to ignore this period in the wake of Louis Althusser’s influential notion of the “epistemological break.” According to this periodization, after the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology in 1845 Marx breaks from the naïve humanism of Feuerbach and all forms of left-Hegelian thought. If one follows this they’re bound to sideline the young Marx, to see his early work as pre-Marxist. But while this may indeed be a rupture that propels his practice in a new direction, I want to argue that Marx never entirely abandons humanism, Hegel or philosophical principles as Althusser suggests.
To be sure, the novelty of Marx’s rupture with left-Hegelian thought is significant. But we must not abandon the crucial pre-1845 thought of Marx, especially given that it entails valuable political lessons. This early period from 1841–1845, when he finished his dissertation, got a job as an editor at a leading liberal newspaper and then resigned due to censorship is important to study today as the socialist movement, similar to this time in Marx’s life, finds itself fully ensconced within liberal institutions. The “epistemological break” is thus not reducible to epistemology; it is a break with liberal institutions as much as it is a break with the humanist philosophy that subtends those institutions.
When Marx first became a journalist after completing his dissertation on Greek atomism, the liberal intelligentsia was celebrating the rise to power of the seemingly “pro free speech” Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. His accession to the throne in 1840 had been eagerly awaited by most liberal intellectuals and state bureaucrats, and his December 1841 decree of new regulations and “instructions” was widely celebrated for reining in state censorship. As editor of the leading liberal newspaper the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx resisted the censure imposed by the state and he argued that it led to a “pseudoliberalism.”
Marx was so resolutely opposed to censorship that he questioned whether his liberal peers really believed in freedom of the press because they uncritically followed the censorship rules. This was a problem that was not only a problem for journalism, it impacted the philosophy of liberalism itself as it gave rise to what I will call the “censorship complex” — a complex in which the humanist ideals of freedom and liberty cannot be realized as philosophical principles in the wider public sphere. The progressive shift within the Prussian state that granted power to the liberal intelligentsia and empowered them to freely write and engage the public without censorship was an illusion, it led to a partial and stunted realization of the higher ideals of freedom in society. We can understand the problem of censorship for Marx as placing a fetish or a cover over the true ideals that underpin political values. The censor not only controls what is written, they hold a power that fundamentally controls the direction of the realization of thought in the public. In this way the censor contributes to a wider complex that fundamentally compromises the liberal intellectual, forcing them to place a naïve trust in bourgeois institutions as the arbiters of a compromised freedom.
The ideals of “freedom of the press” become effectively unrealizable in a practical sense because when censorship dominates the public sphere this results in a superstitious and irrational public sphere. Marx writes that “in the essence of censorship lies a basic defect which no law can correct.” This defect leads to a crisis in civic education and social reality. The liberal intellectual cannot propagate a vision of collective social reality when they are beholden to the private whims of capital backed up by the state. Marx’s argument is that the bourgeois public sphere, dominated by censorship, stunts public education and undermines the enlightenment project upon which liberalism is founded.
That liberalism makes a naïve détente with state censorship is evident in a foundational text of liberal political thought, Immanuel Kant’s What is Enlightenment? Liberal philosophers, from Hobbes to Locke, have tended to frame the debate over censorship between public and private censorship, where the private sphere refers to universities and publishers
LIVESTREAM BOOK LAUNCH:
“MARXISM AND THE FUTURE OF THE LEFT”
Join us for a livestream discussion on the book featuring some of my favoriate Marxist and socialist scholars and political activists. Featuring: Conrad Hamilton * Khadija Haynes * Daniel Tutt * Bram Gieben * Matt McManus * Dhruv Jain * Marina Simakova * J.P. Caron