This volume contains the following articles:

• Introduction - Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn, Kosmas Psychopedis
• Dialectical Theory: Problems of Reconstruction - Kosmas Psychopedis
• Between Philosophy and Science: Marxian Social Economy as Critical Theory - Hans-Georg Backhaus
• Social Constitution and the Form of the Capitalist State - Werner Bonefeld
• The Global Accumulation of Capital and the Periodisation of the Capitalist State Form - Simon Clarke
• The Bourgeois.State Form Revisited - Heide Gerstenberger

Edited by Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopedis, 1992.

Introduction
W. BONEFELD, R. GUNN, K. PSYCHOPEDIS

In 1978 Althusser announced that Marxism was in crisis.1 Apparently, throughout the 1980s, this crisis merely intensified: the resurgence of liberalism and the ‘New Right’, the accommodation of socialist and social democratic parties to ‘realistic’ monetarism and — at the close of the decade — the crumbling of socialist regimes in the East. Marxism seemed to become at best unfashionable and, at worst, outdated. ‘Post-Marxism’, sometimes indistinguishable from anti-Marxism, undertakes to announce what it terms ‘new times’. In all of this, however, the target identified by Marxism’s critics has been Marxist theory and practice to which various kinds of ‘closure’ applies. Indeed, the Marxism proclaimed by Althusser to be in crisis was specifically structuralist Marxism, a sophisticated variety of determinism of which his own earlier works had been the prophetic texts. Ironically offshoots of structuralist Marxism flourished in the 1980s under the patronage of what became known as the Regulation Approach. It was as if Marxism felt it necessary to trump New Right sociologies by playing the card of a sociology of its own. Marxism succumbed to precisely the danger of scientism inherent in sociological projects, as in the equation of ‘new times’ with the scenarios dubbed post-fordist: just here, in the celebration of new technology (computers, the microchip revolution) and in the foretelling of a novel historical stage just-around-the-corner, the ancient themes of technological determinism and of a teleological conception of social change broke out. Sometimes, of course, the colonisation of Marxist theoretical and political territory by New-Right liberalism was more bare faced: Rational Choice Marxism, which throughout its development has wriggled on the pin of the atomised, self-interested individual whom Marx condemns, and which makes even the scientism of sociology appear radical by approaching what Althusser called the ‘society effect’ solely in terms of a logic of unintended consequences and equilibria, is the main case in point. What used to be known as the ‘dialectical’ dimension of Marxism was, in all of this, the main casualty. The most rigorous schools of Marxist methodology enunciated in the 1980s — for instance Critical Realism — were animated by a slogan as old (within Marxism) as the 1890s: ‘Back to Kant!’ Or rather back to precisely the Kant of Anglophone, analytical philosophy. Back to the closure and positivism of sociology, too, inasmuch as sociological discipline tapped originally Kantian, or rather neo-Kantian, roots2 .

These methodological shifts had their parallels in Marxist social theory. One central topic of concern was the crisis of Keynesianism and the resurgence of monetarist views. This crisis brought with it a crisis in a ‘Marxism of structures’, à la Althusser and Poulantzas, inasmuch as such Marxism took as its object precisely the structures whose demise now seemed to be sure. The attempt to reconstitute social relations on the basis of flexibilization3 and ever more sensitised market relations (imposed, in the event, through international money markets) was proclaimed as the end of Marxist social theorising per se. Underwriting this attempt was the boom of the 1980s. Thus, the ‘legitimacy crisis’ of the Keynesian state4 and the ‘crisis of Marxism’ could be portrayed as one and the same. Marxism, where it endorsed this diagnosis, became accordingly disarmed. The resulting incorporation into Marxism of scientism, of structures reinvoked and reformulated, of conceptions of historical periodisation (as in the fordist/post-fordist debate),5 dependent ultimately on Weberian ideal-type discourse and of analytical-philosophy concepts of the individualist agent within a market arose, consequently, from particular social and political conditions. The Regulation Approach, for example, holds in the 1980s to the programme of a reformed and restated Keynesianism, a Keynesianism so to say appropriate to new times. The 1980s thus became, all too easily, dismissable as a merely transitional phase — for which teleological legitimation (in the name of a Marxism ‘keeping up to date’) could be no less easily supplied. 1980s Marxism, in this fashion, was all too ready to endorse existing reality (and its ideological projections) so that its project became confined to one of chasing the tail of the capitalist dog. Two points follow from these comments: the first is that a Marxism which restricts its horizons to those of the crisis — of existing structures remains blinkered, in such a way that their crisis becomes its crisis; social contradiction and hence revolutionary practice drop out of sight. The second is that the closure of 1980s Marxism — indeed of all Marxism which takes social developments at their face value — carries with it the danger of accepting reality uncritically and thereby reinforcing the foreclosure upon possibilities which such reality finds itself unable to incorporate as its own. Almost all 1980s Marxism counts as ‘closed’ Marxism in this, scientistic and positivistic, sense. The weakness of 1980s Marxism appears to us consequent upon its endorsement of the thesis that Marxism has been outpaced and defeated, a thesis deriving its surface plausibility from that decade’s social reconstitution and — the other side of the same coin — its abrasive attack on the working class.

Hence, the timeliness of supplying an alternative reference-point: open marxism. ‘Openness’, here, refers not just to a programme of empirical research — which can elide all too conveniently with positivism — but to the openness of Marxist categories themselves. This openness appears in, for instance, a dialectic of subject and object, of form and content, of theory and practice, of the constitution and reconstitution of categories in and through the development, always crisis-ridden, of a social world. Crisis refers to contradiction, and to contradiction’s movement: this movement underpins, and undermines, the fixity of structuralist and teleological-determinist Marxism alike. Rather than coming forward simply as a theory of domination — ‘domination’ reporting something inert, as it were a heavy fixed and given weight — open Marxism offers to conceptualise the contradictions internal to domination itself. Crisis, understood as a category of contradiction, entails not just danger but opportunity. Within theory, crisis enunciates itself as critique.

Critique is open inasmuch as it involves a reciprocal interrelation between the categories of theory (which interrogates practice) and of practice (which constitutes the framework for critique). Of course the question of Marxism’s openness (or closure) is as old as Karl Popper’s polemics of the 1940s;6 and indeed Popper’s charge of dogmatic closure could, perhaps, be seen as applying to Marxisms of a deterministic (that is dialectical materialist or structuralist) kind. Their closure is that of the societies to whose conceptualisation they restrict themselves, and whose modus vivendi they take at face value. It should be apparent, however, that open Marxism in the present collection’s title refers to an openness not to be specified in Popper’s sense. For Popper, openness refers to the ability-to-be-continued of empirical research programmes. For us, the continuation of such programmes is in no way incompatible with closure at the level of categories, methodologies and concepts, that is, with precisely the scientism which reflects (and flatters) a closed social world. Openness in our sense refers to categories first and to empirical continuation second; it is the openness of theory which construes itself as the critical self-understanding of a contradictory world.

A further brief indication of what we understand by ‘closure’ in contrast to openness may be helpful at this point. ‘Closed’ Marxism is Marxism which does either or both of two interrelated things: it accepts the horizons of a given world as its own theoretical horizons and/or it announces a determinism which is causalist or telelogical as the case may be. (Closure in Popper’s sense encompasses only teleological determinism.) These two aspects of closure are interrelated because acceptance of horizons amounts to acceptance of their inevitability and because determinist theory becomes complicit in the foreclosing of possibilities which a contradictory world entails.

This being so, a central target for Marxism with an open character is fetishism. Fetishism is the construal (in theory) and the constitution (in practice) of social relations as ‘thinglike’, perverting such relations into a commodified and sheerly structural form. Closed Marxism substitutes fetished theory for the — critical — theory of fetishism which open Marxism undertakes. Hostile to the movement of contradiction, the former reinforces and reproduces the fetishism which, officially, it proclaims against. It follows that the crisis of structures is equally the crisis of the Marxism which takes structures as its reference point, and however allegedly ‘flexible’ the structures, the crisis of their theory runs no less deep. Accordingly, the category of fetishism is one which, directly or indirectly, all of the contributors to the present volume address.

This is not to say that ‘open Marxism’ is a wholly novel approach. Far from it: a subterranean tradition of open Marxism has, since the turn of the century, subsisted alongside Marxisms of more mainstream, and also academic, kinds. Figures in the open Marxist tradition include, inter alia, Luxemburg, the early Lukács, Korsch, Bloch, Adorno, Rubin, Pashukanis, Rosdolsky and Johannes Agnoli (from whom our title derives).7 Lists of such a kind are, to be sure, always problematic and not all of the authors represented in the present work would evaluate the figures mentioned in the same way. Nonetheless this tradition supplies a common background against which questions are raised. In the 1970s, the sources of the tradition were renewed through republication and translation, and through a series of methodological debates. A t the same time, in Britain, debates flourishing within the CSE (Conference of Socialist Economists) reopened discussion of categories such as value, labour process, the state, world market, social form, etc., upon the soil of a Keynesianism in crisis.8 These diverse debates placed at issue the conceptual and political status of fundamental Marxist categories. For a brief period, it seemed that what was hitherto marginal could lie at the centre. Underlying this centring was the (for the post-war period) unprecedented class conflict of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Along with the exhaustion of this conflict and with the failure of social democratic responses to it, erstwhile marginal theory became remarginalised once again. Realistic and scientistic currents already present in the 1970s (capital-logic, structuralism, realism — however ‘critical’ — and the Marxist assimilation of corporatism)9 entered the ascendant, modifying themselves to fit the contours of 1980s terrain. One aim of the present volumes, accordingly, is to reopen a space — only uncertainly established during the 1970s — wherein voices of theoretical and practical critique can gain new strength.

Within the tradition of Marxism which the present volume seeks to develop, the central category of openness is that of critique. The connection between openness and critique is straightforward enough: if society develops openly, and thereby contradictorily, then an identification of its contradiction(s) amounts to a reflection on the instability of whatever forms this contradiction assumes. Social ‘structures’ only have a parlous existence in a contradictory world. Marx launched the term ‘critique’ on its contemporary course when he subtitled Capital ‘A Critique of Political Economy’. However, Marxists have disputed amongst themselves the force and meaning of the term ‘critique’.

Either it can be said that Marx criticised only bourgeois political economy, and sought to replace it with a revolutionary political economy of his own. In this case — and it is the reading of the subtitle favoured by Marxists and Marx-critics as diverse as Hilferding, Lenin, Althusser and Joan Robinson — we are returned to the notion that social structures exist, as facts or artifacts, and that the only problem is to identify the cogwheels which allow the structures to be meshed. Or it can be said that Marx sought to criticise, not just bourgeois political economy, but the notion of political economy as such. This latter is the reading favoured by our authors.

The contributions in this and the following volume address, within a framework of openness and from different perspectives, a wide range of topics which have become classic in Marxist discussion: epistemology, dialectics, theory and practice, crisis, value theory, class, normative values, state theory, historical materialism and questions of periodisation. Implicitly and/or explicitly, each contri­bution involves criticism of 1980s Marxist debates and seeks to map the outlines of an alternative view. Thematic issues common to various of our contributors include: subject-object dialectics, the relation of abstract to concrete analysis, structure and struggle, logical/historical interrelations, form-analysis and the preconditions for theory of a revolutionary kind. On these scores, the debates are not merely external but internal: an intersecting of differing views is to be found amongst our contributors themselves. We have made no attempt to avoid this, the reopening of a space for critique involving, necessarily, a problematising of the category of ‘openness’ per se. Thus the format of both of our volumes — a collection of articles — is intrinsic to its substance. An open critique enunciated monologically would amount to a contradiction in terms.

* * *

The present volume focuses on dialectics and history, whereas our second volume concentrates on the unity of theory and practice. The questions of dialectics and of the unity of theory and practice are of course interlinked, especially through an emphasis on historical and political concerns. The continuing political and conceptual importance of ‘dialectics’, a term which these days may appear to have an all too unfashionable resonance, is something that we hope to make clear as we proceed.

Within Marxism, an understanding of the term ‘dialectics’ has always been a matter of contention. Sometimes, as in Engels’ later writings and in the ‘dialectical materialism’ of the Lenin and Stalin years, the term has connoted general laws of nature and society: the most famous of these is the ‘law’ according to which quantitative change will at some point become qualitative change (as when a quantitative increase in the temperature of water leads to a qualitative alteration between water and steam). At other times, and especially in Anglophone Marxism, dialectics is taken to mean simply an interaction or interdependency as between two or more terms. Sometimes, indeed, dialectics is dismissed altogether as a Hegelian baggage which Marx, unfortunately, felt compelled to carry around. Writers as diverse as della Volpe, Colletti, Althusser and Roy Bhaskar tend to take this positivist tack. At the opposite extreme there stands a tradition of ‘Hegelian Marxism’ (Lukács, Korsch and Bloch, for example) who emphasise dialectics as signalling a unity of opposites and a movement of contradiction, and who stress the centrality of the idea of contradiction in Marx’s work.

The ‘Hegelian Marxist’ understanding of dialectics moved into the centre of Marxist debates during the 1970s on issues such as ‘value’ and the ‘state’. The theme of the state debate was dialectics understood as movement-in-contradiction. The state debate focused on the question of state-form and the historical periodization of the bourgeois state’s development. Hence the structure of the present volume: two of our contributors (Psychopedis and Backhaus) emphasise the questions of concept formation which are traditional in dialectical theory whereas our three others (Bonefeld, Clarke and Gerstenberger) take up questions of dialectics in relation to state theory. The theory of the state, apart from its evident political importance, is arguably the site where the difference between structuralist and dialectical/critical (that is ‘open’) Marxism emerges most clearly. Structuralist Marxism (for instance Poulantzas) and conjunctural analysis (for instance Jessop)10 construe the state, either explicitly or implicitly, as one ‘region’ or ‘instance’ of society amongst others, distinguishing itself from traditional dialectical-materialist or economic-determinist style Marxism only by emphasising the state’s ‘relative autonomy’, whereas dialectical and critical Marxism understands the state as a form assumed by the class struggle. This latter approach allows us to see the separation between the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’ as a difference subsisting within, and constituted by, an active unity. On the other hand the structuralist approach makes a methodological principle out of the economics-politics separation inscribed in bourgeois society itself.

The issues of form and of periodization call for further, brief, comment.

Most often, at any rate in Anglophone discussion, ‘form’ is understood in the sense of ‘species’: the forms of something are the specific characters it can assume. For instance, the state can adopt specifically ‘fascist’ or ‘authoritarian’ or ‘bourgeois-liberal’ or ‘fordist’ or ‘post-fordist’ forms. An enormous amount of Marxism (especially recent Marxism, and not only Anglophone Marxism) has understood ‘form’ in this way. On the other hand, ‘form’ can be understood as mode of existence—, something or other exists only in and through the form(s) it takes. The commodity, for example, exists only in and through the money-form and the credit-form and the world market. Upon these two understandings of ‘form’ crucial theoretical and practical differences turn. Theoretically, the idea of form as a species of something more generic has underpinned both the dialectical-materialist-style concep­tion of general laws which have to be applied to specific social instances and the conjunetural approach which says that ‘intermediate concepts’11 are necessary if the gap between generic and specific analysis is to be bridged. What is taken for granted, here, is a dualistic separation of the generic from the specific (otherwise there would be no ‘gap’ to ‘bridge’) and of the abstract from the concrete. On the other hand, the idea of form as mode of existence makes it possible to see the generic as inherent in the specific, and the abstract as inherent in the concrete, because if form is existence then the concrete can be abstract (and vice versa) and the specific can be generic (and vice versa).12 Putting the matter in the bluntest possible fashion, those who see form in terms of species have to try to discover something behind, and underlying, the variant social forms. Those who see form as mode of existence have to try to decode the forms in and of themselves. The first group of theorists have, always, to be more or less economic-reductionist. The second group of theorists have to dwell upon critique and the movement of contradiction as making clear, for its own part, the ‘forms’ that class struggle may take. To this, old-style dialectics together with new-style sociology are, thus, implacably opposed.

During the 1980s, those who see form in terms of species have tried to reformulate their approach by drawing upon Gramsci’s ‘conjunctural’ analysis. An example is the debate on the alleged transition, within recent and current capitalist development, from ‘fordist’ to ‘post-fordist’ new times.13 Proponents of the thesis that such a transition is under way see themselves as breaking, definitively, with the idea of applying dialectical laws as a means of elucidating historical change.

However, their own approach may not be so very different. A sociological approach to social change still seeks to identify key variables (such as technological development from mass assembly lines to ‘new technology’ or shifting articulations of ‘the economy’ and ‘politics’) which make everything clear. Talk of ‘laws’ may not be in fashion, but the identification of key variables is. And, in the event, the notions of ‘laws’ and ‘key variables’ stand or fall together: identification of laws depends on the identification of such variables and, once such variables are identified, why not speak about laws? Sociological laws and dialectical laws, alike, abut on to determinism and by doing so marginalise class struggle, and historical agency in general, as a ‘voluntarism’ which merely complements the movement of social structures themselves.

The relevance of the issue of historical periodization is this: whoever divides history into ‘periods’, whether or not these periods be termed ‘modes of production’, is thinking of form in a genus/species way. First of all we have a global theory of social change, and then we have its specific, or conjunctural, deployment. In contrast to this, form-analysis construes the historical development of capitalism as discontinuous only in and through the continuity of its form: that is through the movement of contradiction constituted by class. Once the relation between structure and struggle is seen in terms of form as mode-of-existence one can never return to ideas of the development of capitalism on the basis of distinct stages, as it were from the liberal state to state monopoly capitalism (as in Lenin) or from fordism to post-fordism. Dialectics comes into its own as the critique of, precisely, such a division into stages. Critique comes into its own dialectically, as inherent in the movement of contradiction and, so, an open Marxism is able to demystify the notion of new times in a forceful way.14

The political implications of all of this are drastic. That is, they are exciting because they open on to a terrain where nothing is assured. If we are told, theoretically, that we live under the sign of some species of capital’s existence then there is nothing for it but to buckle down and make the best of a poor (poor because oppressive) social and technological job. New times are our fate. If, on the other hand, we learn that form amounts not to species but to mode of existence then it is incumbent on ourselves to act within, and through, and against, the form(s) under which we live. In ‘the last instance’, these forms are our own. The traditional Marxist dichotomy as between ‘structure’ and ‘struggle’ is surpassed because class struggle is informed while, at the same time, class struggle forms and informs the conditions which it either takes on board, reproduces, or explodes.

A number of practical as well as theoretical points turn upon the understanding of dialectics. If, for instance, one thinks of dialectics in terms of ‘laws’ it is only a small step to envisage a (Leninist) revolutionary party which, in virtue of its knowledge of these laws, should be entrusted with deciding how they should be applied. If, on the other hand, one sheerly dismisses dialectics then one is forced to think of society as an articulation of static structures and, once again, a pathway is cleared to the notion of an elite (not of dialecticians, this time, but of sociologists) who should intervene in order to juggle the structures in a leftist way. The notion of the movement of contradiction points in a quite different political direction: if society is the movement of contradiction then the further development of such contradictions is a matter of what Marx called the ‘self-emancipation’ of the working class. The dichotomy of immediate struggle and socially static structures has to be transcended. Form-analytical categories are social categories, and vice versa. Such categories exist not just in theory, as generic abstractions from the specificity of political practice, but in and through and as practice as well.

* * *

The contributions to this volume attempt to recover this dialectical insight from different perspectives.

Kosmas Psychopedis, who has published widely on Kant, Hegel and the dialectics of social theory, in the present volume attempts a reconstruction of dialectical theory which portrays Kant as a forerunner of Hegel and Marx. Psychopedis’s reconstruction of dialectics is a critique of varieties of recent Kantian Marxism (for instance Colletti, Bhaskar) which focus only on isolated aspects of Kant such as transcendental deduction. Further, it allows the question of material preconditions of social existence to come (politically) to light. Psychopedis criticises on the one hand the downplaying of materiality in favour of solely formal discussion in Marxist theory of form determination and, on the other hand, the conception of materiality as structure to be found in the scientistic and structuralist Marxism of form-determination’s enemies. These latter — the realists and the structuralists — fail to pose the crucial questions inherent in a subject-object dialectic of materiality and form.

Hans-Georg Backhaus, a student of Adorno’s, is currently researching, together with Helmut Reichelt, the methodology of political economy in relation to critical theory. Backhaus’s publications are devoted to value theory, money theory and dialectics. His concern is with the relation between the philosophic and economic dimensions of political economy’s approach. For Backhaus, a critique of political economy is impossible unless these dimensions are synthesised. His emphasis in the present volume is on the ‘double character’ of Marxist categories (as both subjective and objective, abstract and concrete). His definition of objectivity as alienated subjectivity develops conceptions of Adorno’s. For Backhaus, the abstract categories in Marx are concrete; value thus exists as social practice and, as such, contradictorily.

Werner Bonefeld, who has published widely debated articles on state theory and Marxist methodology, reworks form analysis as a critique of recent Marxist state-debates. His contribution focuses on the internal relation between structure and struggle, permitting an understanding of the state-form as a movement of contradiction in and through class.

Simon Clarke, whose numerous publications have been pivotal for the development of Marxist state theory in Britain, focuses on the form and development of class struggle in the face of crises of global overaccumulation. Clarke’s emphasis is upon the specific functions arrogated to itself by the state in the course of class struggle. His contribution explores and rejects attempts to periodise the development of capitalism in a Marxist way.

Heide Gerstenberger contributed to the state debates of the 1970s and 1980s. Her work has been characterised by a synthesis of social theory and historical analysis. Here, she critically discusses some classic questions of historical materialism: the role of classes in social development, the dynamics of historical change and the nature of ‘bourgeois revolution’. These questions are debated in relation to the new ‘revisionist’ historiography concerning the French Revolution.15 This historiography problematises notions of a revolution carried through by a ‘rising bourgeoisie’: Gerstenberger rejects the ‘rising bourgeisie’ thesis in and through a reformulation of historical materialist ideas.

• 1 L. Althusser, Die Krise des Marxismus (Hamburg/Berlin, 1978)
• 2For a discussion on the relation of Kant to Marxism see Psychopedis (present volume). On the schools of Marxism above mentioned, see: L. Althusser/E. Balibar, Reading Capital (London 1970); N. Poulantzas, ]Political Power and Social Classes (London, 1973); M. Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Accumulation (London, 1979); A. Lipietz, The Enchanted World (London, 1985), Mirages and Miracles (London 1987) and ‘Imperialism or the Beast of the Apocalypse’ Capital & Class, no. 22 (1984); J. Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge, 1985); J. Roemer (ed), Analytical Marxism (Cambridge, 1986); R. Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (Leeds, 1975); and Reclaiming Reality (London, 1989); B. Jessop, ‘State Forms, Social Basis and Hegemonic Projects’, Kapitalistate 10/11 (1983) and Regulation Theories in Retrospect and Prospect (Bielefeld, 1988); J. Hirsch and R. Roth, Das neue Gesicht des Kapitalismus, Vom Fordismus zum Post-Fordismus (Hamburg, 1986
• 3For critiques of ‘flexibilisation’ see: F. Murray, ‘Flexible Specialisation in the “Third Italy”, Capital & Class, no. 33 (1987) and A. Pollert, ‘Dismantling Flexibility’, Capital & Class, no. 34 (1988).
• 4Cf. J. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (London 1976); C. Offe, Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates (Frankfurt, 1972) and C. Offe, ‘ “Ungovernability”: The Renaissance of Conservative Theories of Crisis’ in J. Keane (ed), Contradictions of the Welfare State (London, 1984).
• 5Cf. W. Bonefeid and J. Holloway (eds), Post-Fordism and Social Form (London, 1991); also Science as Culture no. 8, (London, 1990) (special issue on post-fordism).
• 6The classic statement is K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London, 1945); also The Poverty of Historicism (London, 1957). See further I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge, 1970) and T. W. Adorno et.al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (London, 1976).
• 7See E. Mandel and J. Agnoli, Offener Marxismus (Frankfurt/New York, 1980).
• 8See the journal Capital & Class and the forthcoming series of CSE publications from Macmillan.
• 9For ‘capital-logic’, cf. E. Altvater ‘Some Problems of State Interventionism’ in J. Holloway and S. Picciotto (eds), State and Capital: A Marxist Debate (London, 1978). For an instance of the assimilation of corporatism, see B. Jessop ‘Capitalism and Democracy: The best Possible Political Shell?’ in G. Littlejohn (ed), Power and the State (London, 1978).
• 10See B. Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Strategy (London, 1985) for a reworking of Poulantzas in terms of ‘conjunctural analysis’.
• 11For example M. Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Accumulation; B. Jessop, Regulation Theories in Retrospect and Prospect: cited in footnote 2 above.
• 12The locus classicus for this theme is Marx’s 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse.
• 13Cf. Marxism Today, October 1988 ‘New Times: A Marxism Today Special on Britain in the Nineties’; ‘Facing Up to the Future’ 7 Days (London, September 1988).
• 14Cf. E. Peláez and J. Holloway ‘Learning to Bow: Post-Fordism and Technological Determinism’, Science as Culture, no. 8, (London, 1990).
• 15For the origins of the ‘revisionist’ historiography see A. Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1968). Cf. G. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge (London, 1987).

This volume contains the following articles:

• Introduction - Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn, Kosmas Psychopedis
• Against Historical Materialism: Marxism as First-Order Discourse - Richard Gunn
• Historical Materialist Science, Crisis and Commitment - Joseph Fracchia and Cheyney Ryan
• Interpretation of the Class Situation Today: Methodological Aspects - Antonio Negri
• The Inversion of Class Perspective in Marxian Theory: From Valorisation to Self-Valorisation - Harry Cleaver
• Crisis, Fetishism, Class Composition - John Holloway

Edited by Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopedis, 1992.

Introduction
WERNER BONEFELD, RICHARD GUNN, KOSMAS PSYCHOPEDIS

The present volume continues where our first left off: we turn from the notion of dialectics and history to the notion of the unity of theory and practice. Theory and practice cannot be separated from the open Marxist debate on history and dialectics; both presuppose and are the result of each other. Such was implied in our introduction to Volume One where we outlined the notion of an open Marxism. In the present introduction we take the ‘definition’ of open Marxism for granted and launch directly into addressing the issue of theory and practice within the open Marxist debate. The aim of the volume is to elucidate the relationship between theory and practice and to explore some of the issues to which it gives rise. These issues include the epistemological foundations of Marxist theory (Gunn/Fracchia and Ryan), class and self-determination (Cleaver/Negri) and fetishism and class composition (Holloway). None of our contributors would be likely to agree with each other on the precise understanding of the unity of theory and practice, nor for that matter on the relation between structure and struggle upon which the notion of the unity of theory and practice turns. However, a common concern of our contributors is their rejection of an understanding of practice as merely attendant upon the unfolding of structural or deterministic ‘laws’. This common concern might be summed up in terms of an understanding of class as the constitutive power of history and of commitment as a requirement for taking social responsibility.

In our introduction to the first volume we emphasised that open Marxism entails the openness of categories themselves. The openness of categories — an openness on to practice — obtains as a reflexive critique of ideologies and social phenomena, which, for their part, exist as moments of historically asserted forms of class struggle. Open Marxism’s starting point is the class antagonism between capital and labour. An understanding of the ‘primacy of class’ implies a constant change on the part of social ‘reality’ and a constant change in the form of the class struggle. In turn, the understanding of social reality as constantly moving implies the incompleteness of categories as the social development appears in various forms and within changing empirical circumstances. Instead of the theoretical certainty of a Marxism of dogmatic closure, open Marxism reclaims the incompleteness of the process of thinking and readopts the unpredictability of the ‘legitimation of chance’1 i.e. the unpredictability of the movement of class struggle. Following upon the contributions in Volume One, the understanding of social objectivity as alienated subjectivity entails an internal relation, rather than an external dualism, between structure and struggle.

The separation between structure and struggle entails a deterministic conceptualisation of capital in that capital becomes a structure of inescapable lines of development, subordinating social practice to pre-determined ‘laws’. On the other hand, understanding capital as a social relation implies that there are no inescapable lines of development. Alleged ‘lines of development’ are the fetished forms of the capital-labour relation itself, i.e. of class struggle. Open Marxism insists on the antagonistic nature of social existence. This being so, the Marxist understanding of a unity of theory and practice entails not the theoretical suppression of class struggle, but the invocation of class struggle as the movement of the contradiction in which capital, itself, consists.

All of this carries with it pungent implications for the way in which Marxism approaches the issue of ‘class’. If there were to be a dualism between structure and struggle, then nothing less than a one-sided abstraction of capital would obtain. Such abstraction, in turn, assumes that the logic of capital is the key to the emergence and development of the working class. Determinist Marxism and capital-logic Marxism have marched together, whether in Leninist-revolutionary or in reformist or in post-fordist guise. Capital sets the questions, and it is up to the working class to propose whatever answers it sees fit.

Within this tradition, ‘class’ is construed in sociological terms. Debates on the score of whether the proletariat is to be identified with the manual working class, on the score of whether the manual working class still counts as the majority of workers, and on attempts to identify a ‘new working class’ or a ‘new petty bourgeoisie’2 all take as their basic problematic the question: to which class can this or that individual be assigned? More recent versions of the same problematic have foregrounded the notion of ‘contradictory’ class relations,3 but this renders the problematic more complex without challenging its basic features. The notion of classes as pigeonholes or ‘locations’ to which the sociologist must assign individuals ultimately invokes static and struggle-disconnected structures. Current fordist/post-fordist debates about the class significance of work at computer terminals or in the service industries are to the same effect. These are quantitative conceptions of class, presupposing that the political significance of class can be established by counting heads. The alternative qualitative conception of class, which addresses it not as matter of grouping individuals but as a contradictory and antagonistic social relation, has hitherto been a somewhat marginalised tradition of Marxist thought.

This latter tradition has always insisted that social phenomena have to be seen as forms assumed by class struggle, as forms in and against which social conflict obtains. Capital, it suggests, is a social relation of an antagonistic kind. Capital is therefore always in a position of having to recompose itself by reintegrating the working class into the capital-relation. The conceptual foundation for this approach is the circumstance that the relation between capital and labour is asymmetrical: capital depends upon labour, for its valorisation, but labour for its part in no way depends, necessarily, on capital’s rule. The political foundation for such an approach is to be discovered in the history of class struggle — frequently ignored or marginalised, even by Marxist theoreticians — over the extraction of surplus labour which has occurred ever since capitalism, as a reified social ‘system’, got into gear.

The question of ‘form’, understood as ‘mode of existence’, was discussed in Volume One: the question addressed in the present volume is that of the implications for class and the unity of theory and practice of this understanding of ‘form’.

Open Marxism urges both the opening of concepts on to practice, whose capacity for renewal and innovation always surprises us, and the mediating of that practice through categories of a critical and self-critical kind. Thereby it transcends the dichotomy: theory or practice. The notion that theory and practice form a unity is as old as Marxism itself; however, traditional schools of Marxism — and these include the dialectical materialist Marxism-Leninism of the Stalin years as well as the ‘structuralism’ of more recent decades — have tended to see the theorist as standing outside of society and as reflecting, externally, upon it. Within such conceptual frameworks, the unity of theory and practice can amount only to the application of theory to practice. Structuralism and voluntarism are dichotomous, though conjoint, outcomes of such an approach. Structuralism and voluntarism are complementary inasmuch as they are the result of the separation between allegedly abstract laws and subjectivity. Open Marxism moves beyond such a dichotomy by acknowledging theory to obtain in and of practice and by acknowledging practice (that is, human or social practice) to occur only in some reflectively considered, or unreflectively assumed, set of terms. Theory can be no less concrete than practice, and practice can be no less abstract than theory. We do not have two movements dualistically counter-posed but a single theoretico-practical class movement which, to be sure, contains differences and diversity within itself.

A single theoretico-practical class movement of this kind entails the practical reflexivity of theory and the theoretical reflexivity of practice as different moments of the same totalisation. If there were to be, as structuralist approaches urge, a disunity of subjectivity and objectivity, then there could be no question of an internal relation between social phenomena or of, what is the same thing, social moments subsisting as one another’s mode of existence (or ‘form’). Hence, form-analysis and the unity of theory and practice imply one another. The internal relation between theory and practice, or between subjectivity and objectivity, connotes the theoretical difficulties, and failures, of structuralist approaches: first of all capital is seen by such approaches as a logical construct, moving within a particular set of objective laws, whereas, secondly, any historical analysis renders necessary the reintroduction of subjective aspects. Hence, the apparently opposed terms ‘structuralism’ and ‘voluntarism’ stand related to one another in a complementary way.

The interlinked themes of form-analysis and the unity of theory and practice introduce us, directly, on to the terrain of critique. Precisely the dualistic separations of a fetished world — the separations of subject from object, of struggle from structures, of theory from practice and of one ‘region’ of society from another — are to be called in question rather than being inscribed, in taken-for-granted fashion, as the principles of social thought. Conversely, critique implies form-analysis and the thesis of the unity of theory and practice. It does so because only if social forms (including theory’s own form) are understood as internally related modes of existence can the fetishism of discrete ‘regions’ and ‘entities’ and ‘facts’ and ‘ideologies’ be called to account.

This approach to critique allows us to see what is wrong with various allegedly critical schools of contemporary thought. The case of structuralism has already been discussed: it premises itself upon a distinction between regions of social existence (e.g. ‘the economic’ and ‘the political’), thereby inscribing as a methodological principle the fetishism which criticism contends against. A related case is that of ‘Critical Realism’, which (cf. Psychopedis in Volume One) employs Kantian transcendental argument in such a way as to consolidate rather than criticise the phenomena it explores.4 The ‘Rational Choice’ or ‘Analytical’ Marxism of the 1980s, similarly, takes for granted a conception of bourgeois individuality and a politics/economics separation á la structuralism.5 Two further schools of thought which characterise themselves as critical share similar deficiencies. Post-modernism declares against ‘teleological’ conceptions of history but places itself at the mercy of, precisely, history by declaring virtually all historical analysis to be of a teleological sort.6 It draws its own historical teeth. Philosophy of science, which, like post-modernism, has always stood opposed to historical teleologies,7 has in recent years abutted on to history8 but remains equivocal as between philosophical and merely historical accounts.

What is lacking in all of these approaches is that they fail to deepen critique into a theory-practice unity. They advertise theorising which is either merely theory of practice (as in structuralism) or merely theory which is in practice (e.g. post-modernism). At most, as in the Critical Realism version of philosophy of science, they see theory and practice as causally (and, therefore, still externally) linked. What lies beyond their horizons is a conception of theory as in and of practice, i.e. which is analytical and critical and social-scientific and philosophical all in the same movement and in the same breath. Only a practically reflexive critique can achieve this. Or, in other words, critique can be achieved only in the light of the category of form. Form, once freed from the grip of structuralism and empiricism which understands it merely in terms of the different species something or other can take, signals the mode(s) of existence of the contradictory movement in which social existence consists. Critique moves within its object and, at the same time, is a moment of its object. Thus, critique implies a unity of theory and practice which permits a demystification of ‘structures’, ‘empirical facts’ and ‘ideologies’ as fetished forms assumed by social relations. The forms assumed by social relations are the object of critique which, itself, is an open process: there is no externality to the form(s) assumed by social relations. On the same score, critique is essentially practical as it theorises the form-giving fire of social relations. Critique implies form-analysis and vice-versa. ‘All social relations are essentially practical’ (Marx).

Richard Gunn, whose recent strongly debated critique of Critical Realism maps out a fresh approach to questions of Marxist methodology, seeks to renew the tradition of a theory/practice-based Marxism stemming from, amongst others, Lukács and to deploy the insights of such a tradition against historical materialist thought in both its old-style and its new-style versions. Gunn’s conception of the unity of theory and higher-order metatheory criticises versions of ‘Marxism’ which distinguish between structure and subjectivity. His contention is that once we attempt a theory of history and society we sever, at source, the unity of theory and practice which Marx projects.

Joseph Fracchia, whose recent work on Marxism and philosophy reconstructs the conception of critique, and Cheyney Ryan, who has published on the themes of equality and exploitation, pick up on the question of the unity of theory and practice by developing an argument the context for which is twofold: post-modern thought and contemporary developments in philosophy of science. Their intriguing contention is that the work of Thomas Kuhn can help us to overcome not only the deficiencies of post-modernism, but also the separation of theory from practice inherent in philosophy-of-science style of thought. Their reformulation of Kuhn allows them to bring the practical category of ‘commitment’ on to centre-stage. Theoretical commitment and practical openness go hand in hand.

Antonio Negri, who is known for his work on Marx and class and who has been a leading theorist within the autonomist Marxist tradition, rejects a sociology of class cast in terms of capitalist reproduction. Negri’s stress is on the power of labour as constitutive of social activity; this emphasis allows him to construe social development in terms of revolutionary constitution and rupture. In Negri’s view, communism as a constitutive power obtaining (already) within, and against, capital is the requisite category for any theory purporting to focus on issues of class. The possibility of a constitution of communism he discusses in terms of the category of ‘value’. Contrary to seeing value as an economistic ‘measure’, Negri stresses value’s qualitative and political dimension. Negri’s view of value is at the opposite pole from that favoured by Marxist ‘economics’ and ‘political science’ . Contrary to these views, Negri stresses the real and radical possibility of communist constituent power opened up at the present time.

Harry Cleaver, who has published extensively on the political dimension of Marx’s Capital and on the constitutive power of labour, works within the autonomist marxist tradition associated with Panzieri, Tronti and Negri. In his contribution he contends that ‘new social movements’ need to be understood in terms of class. He focuses on the self-determinating struggle against capitalist appropriation and destruction of social life. The categories of Marxism are discussed in terms of ‘inversion’, or double-sidedness. Crucially, the inverse side of valorisation is ‘disvalorisation’, i.e. loss of identity and the destruction of traditional values (in the plural) as a consequence of capital’s parasitic appropriation of creativity. Resistance to this appropriation involves ‘self-valorisation’ - that is, the emancipatory project of the working class.

John Holloway, who has published widely on the state and class practice, offers the category of ‘fetishism’ as allowing us to understand the internal relation between ‘value’ and class struggle. Social structures become fetished in the same movement as they are studied separately from the struggle in and through which they subsist. Theory becomes fetished in the same movement as it fails to recognise its inherence in a practical world, and practice as understood by such theory is construed in a fetished — a ‘structuralist’ — way. The critique of fetishism and the thesis of a unity of theory and practice, accordingly, walk hand in hand. Holloway’s critique of fetishism draws together the concerns of our two volumes, by urging that theories which take their object for granted, instead of asking why their content takes the form it does, reinforce the fetishism subsisting in practical life.

• 1Cf. K. Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 109
• 2On ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ see S. Clarke, ‘Marxism, Sociology and Poulantzas’s Theory of the State’, Capital & Class, no. 2 (1977); J. Holloway and S. Picciotto (eds) State and Capital: A Marxist Debate (London, 1978), Intro.
• 3See E. O. Wright: ‘Class Boundaries in Advanced Capitalist Societies’, New Left Review no. 98 (London, 1976); Classes (London, 1985); ‘What is Middle about the Middle Class?’ , in J. Roemer (ed.), Analytical Marxism (Cambridge, 1986).
• 4R. Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality (London, 1989); for critique see R. Gunn, ‘Reclaiming Experience’, Science as Culture, no. 11, (1991).
• 5For the politics/economics separation see G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford, 1978); on individualism see J. Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge, 1985), ch. 1. Elster makes it clear that he defends individualism in a methodological sense. However, this defence of his procedure involves him in separating methodology from first-order social thought. The same separation is to be found in philosophy of science. The difficulty is that a theory/metatheory separation involves a theory/practice separation as well: see R. Gunn in this volume. Further on analytical/rational choice Marxism see Roemer (ed), Analytical Marxism (Cambridge 1986); A. Carling, ‘Rational Choice Marxism’, New Left Review, no. 160 (1986).
• 6See J.F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester, 1984). Lyotard declares against ‘metanarratives’, such as teleological stories about the emergence of freedom or truth, and, in their place, argues for a plurality of ‘language games’ each of which entails a struggle for power. In effect he renews, in a fresh rhetorical guise, the pluralism of 1950s Anglo-Saxon political science. He replays the old theme of an ‘end of ideology’. The end of ideology becomes the end of history itself. Lyotard’s discussion, accordingly, remains ahistorical. Ahistorical analyses place themselves at the mercy of the history — indeed, of the metanarratives - they deplore.
• 7 Cf. K. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London, 1957); also his Conjectures and Refutations (London, 1963), ch. 16.
• 8 The founding text of post-empiricist philosophy of science is T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962). Cf. P. Feyerabend, Against Method (London, 1975); R. J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Oxford, 1983); and the rehabilitation of pragmatism in R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford, 1980).

This volume contains the following articles:

• Introduction: Emancipating Marx - Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn, John Holloway, Kosmas Psychopedis
• Capitalism and Reproduction - Mariarosa Dalla Costa
• Emancipating Explanation - Kosmas Psychopedis
• Why did Marx Conceal his Dialectical Method? - Helmut Reichelt
• Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Marx's Critique: A Reassessment - Robert Fine
• The Dialectics of Rights: Transitions and Emancipatory Claims in Marxian Tradition - Manolis Angelidis
• The Complicity of Posthistory - Adrian Wilding
• From Scream of Refusal to Scream of Power: The Centrality of Work - John Holloway
• Capital as Subject and the Existence of labour - Werner Bonefeld

Edited by Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn, John Holloway and Kosmas Psychopedis, 1995.

Introduction: Emancipating Marx
WERNER BONEFELD, RICHARD GUNN, JOHN HOLLOWAY, KOSMAS PSYCHOPEDIS1

The present volume continues the themes developed in the first two volumes of Open Marxism (Pluto Press, 1992). The title of this volume, Emancipating Marx, is intended to be understood in a double sense, integrating the two main concerns of the Open Marxism project. The first concern is the emancipation of Marx (and Marxism) from the sociological and economic heritage which has grown up around it under the banner of 'scientific Marxism', the detrimental effect of which was discussed in our introduction to Volume I of Open Marxism. The emancipation of Marx implies at the same time the understanding of Marx (and Marxism) as emancipating: hence the second sense of the title and the second concern of the project. We regard (open) Marxism as the site of a self-reflection which clears the way towards a defetishised and emancipated social world. Only if we work to clear the massive deadweight of positivist and scientistic/economistic strata can Marxism emerge again as a constitutive moment in that project of emancipation which is its heartland and its home.

Emancipating Marx continues the issues addressed in our first two volumes through a critical analysis of Marxism's false friends and through an emphasis on the emancipatory perspective of Marxism's thought.

The Open Marxism project does not aim to reconstruct Marx's thought, in the sense of presenting an interpretation which masquerades as the sole 'correct' one. Such an approach would not be helpful, for it would presuppose the possibility of a uniform and finished interpretation of Marx's work. Instead we wish to reconstruct the pertinent theses of his work with a view to freeing them from the ballast of their dogmatic presentation.

Central to our approach is an emphatic endorsement of Marx's notion of a unity between theory and practice.2 In the tradition of Marxist 'orthodoxy', the dialectical unity of theory and practice is taken as referring to a ‘field of application’: that is, the practical significance of theory is understood in terms of it being a scientific guide to political practice. This understanding of the relationship between theory and practice is highly misleading. Social practice is construed as something which exits outside the theoretical ‘realm’ and, conversely, theory is understood as something which exists outside the ‘realm’ of practice. There obtains thus a dualism between ‘thought’ and ‘social practice’, between ‘philosophy’ and the ‘human world’. Just as in bourgeois theory, ‘theory’ is transformed into an epistemology which can be applied, from the outside, to a social world which remains external to — and which is at the mercy of — theoretical judgments. The dualist conception of the relationship between theory and practice not only presupposes the social validity of theoretical concepts, but also assumes that the application of these concepts supplies an understanding of a social world. Theory's capacity for supplying judgments on a social world derives from theory's own reified logical and epistemological approach. In other words, the dualism between theory and practice makes theory a reified ‘thing’ at the same time as the social world is perceived as a ‘thing’ of ‘objective’ inquiry. Value-judgments about the good and the nasty are excluded and deemed ‘unscientific’ and replaced by a value-neutral explanation of events, which merely serves to endorse the ‘positive’ as the only criterion of scientific work. Positivism and the relativism which is its obverse side only acknowledges formal contradictions, at best.

Within the orthodox tradition of Marxism, the dualism between theory and practice obtains in the form of a distinction between the logic of capital, on the one hand, and social practice, on the other. The contradictions of capitalism are seen as existing independently of social practice; they are conceived of as objective laws of capital. The development of these contradictions define the framework within which social practice develops. In this case, the specific contribution of Marxism to the comprehension of our social world is understood as the analysis of the objective conditions of social practice.

Modern versions of orthodox Marxism no longer even claim to be concerned with revolutionary transformation. In effect, they staked everything on the existence of a (communist or social democratic) revolutionary party. In the absence of such a party, therefore, revolutionary social change had to be postponed sine diem; and the concepts of the orthodox tradition, deprived of all revolutionary impetus, became transformed into the tenets of just another ‘school’ of social theory. With the abandonment of all revolutionary perspective, Marxist theory becomes just a more sophisticated theory of capitalist reproduction (or ‘regulation’). The only political perspective is then a ‘leftist!’ refashioning of the real world of capitalism: the acceptance of existing realities in order to articulate a viable hegemonic project and ensure its popular appeal so as to reform the institutions of social administration in a fair and just way.3 In sum, the political implications of orthodox Marxism, and its modern variants, are that Marxism has to refrain from the scholarly work of negation4 in favour of supplying sociological knowledge concerning the reformist opportunities already inscribed in objective development.

The concept of experience is at, the heart of the issue of emancipation. Experience, as used here, is quite different from, and opposed to, empiricist notions of experience. Empiricism construes experience as involving passivity, and endorsement of any status quo. By contrast, experience is here understood as constitution and negation and their unity:5 opposition and resistance against inhuman conditions which are the reality of capitalist relations of exploitation — slavery, genocide, dehumanisation of the social individual (especially women), the destruction of the environment, etc. This ‘list’, rather than being a sociological summary of a field of conflict-study and moral outcry, denotes a space of practice, opposition and resistance. As practical and negative, experience is inseparable from capitalist domination. It is the conscious attempt to theorise this experience, and to understand itself as part of this experience, that distinguishes emancipatory theory (open Marxism) from other approaches. Whereas structuralist or scientistic approaches deny or suppress experience (in the name of ‘objectivity’), emancipatory theory takes experience as its starting point and its substance. (This is not to fan into spontaneism, for spontaneism takes experience in its untheorised immediacy, forgetting that experience is shaped by, and shapes, the forms of the social world through which it exists). Furthermore, emancipatory theory implies the rejection of ‘economics’ since economics is constructed upon the supposition of constituted forms, that is, forms of social relations which are seen as finished, closed entities. Political theory — economic theory's complementary form — is likewise to be rejected, for it too is constructed on the presupposed formation of social relations; its project is that of constructing political norms and political institutions on the basis of proprietorial and individualistic rights. A theory which seeks to emancipate necessarily rejects explanations that entertain themselves with a scientistic ordering of concepts in so far as the starting point of such explanations is the disqualification of the experience of resistance-to-dehumanisation.

Marxism is an emancipatory theory and, as such, must always criticise not only a perverted social existence but, and at the same time, the perversion through which it itself exists. For Marxism, there is a need to be critical about the pre-conditions of critical theory itself. Theory which is, or has become, uncritical of itself becomes, necessarily, part of the fetishistic world and of its crisis.

The crisis of theory takes different forms. One of these is the dogmatic teleology of history, according to which the objective laws of capitalism will automatically lead on from capitalist necessity to socialist freedom. Another form is the romantic endorsement of the emancipatory subject which is seen as existing as unmediated human creativity, standing in a relation of direct confrontation with the capitalist world. In both cases, the revolutionary subject is seen as being external to its own perverted world.

These manifestations of a crisis of theory are characterised by the failure to mediate their practical concerns with the social form through which these concerns exist and which this practice sets out to transform. In contrast to an unmediated conception which ascribes objectivity to historical development, and against an equally unmediated notion of the subjectivity of historical practice, Marxism's continued self-reflection upon itself goes forward through the concept of mediation and the method of dialectics. Dialectical theory confronts existing social and theoretical forms with a comprehensive conception of content, materiality and humanity. These forms subsist in a reified and self-contradictory way.6 Thus, the contradictory integration between form and content underlies the possibility of critique and supplies materiality to the transcendence of existing forms. Social transcendence and social reproduction obtains as a unity (a self-contradictory unity) of unity and difference.

This dialectical tension between reproduction and transcendence cannot be addressed in scientistic terms, because it questions the separation between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ upon which scientism is founded. Dialectical theory presupposes value-judgments which negate the existing perversions of social existence in favour of a human world of autonomy, cooperation and social solidarity. These value-judgments both inform and are informed by our understanding of the experience of opposition and of resistance alike.

In the past, emancipatory theory has been reluctant to address directly the problems of 'values' as a constitutive element of dialectics, and has sought to hide behind the scientistic versions of Marxism. Values were derived from a social objectivity which, allegedly, was value-free and value-neutral. We wish to challenge this conception and propose a reassessment of this issue. It is of fundamental importance that the reconstruction of an emancipatory theory should not be drawn into the rejection of values as irrational. A Marxist theory which deems values to be irrational is treading the same path as bourgeois theory since Max Weber.

As in the previous volumes, the idea of Open Marxism is to mark out an area for discussion, rather than to lay down any theoretical or political line. This volume explores a number of thematic issues which are raised in each contribution in different form and with a different emphasis. These issues are: values and explanation, dialectics and history, theory and practice, as well as experience and emancipation. Our introduction has sought to indicate the coherence, and also the political and theoretical urgency, which underlie a thematising of these issues in an open way.

The contributions to this volume thus approach the issue of 'emancipating Marx' from different angles. In the opening essay of the collection, Mariarosa Dalla Costa focuses on the critique of contemporary capitalist development and argues vividly that the depredations of capitalist development (the escalating violence of so-called 'primitive accumulation ') make it unsustainable as a form of society. Particular attention is paid to the doubly antagonistic position of women, as unwaged workers in a waged society. She demands an alternative version of social development, where the social individual defends existing wage levels and welfare rights and, at the same time, reclaims the resources — and the happiness — which capital has expropriated in the past and present.

The three contributions by Fine, Angelidis and Reichelt all try to develop the Critical aspect of Marxism by going back to the texts of Hegel and Marx. Robert Fine's argument is centred on Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Against the traditional schools of interpretation associated with Colletti, Marcuse and Lowith, Fine emphasises the emancipatory and critical character of this work and shows the relevance of this understanding of Hegel for the development of an open Marxism. Manolis Angelidis analyses Marx's treatment of legal forms and norms, focusing in particular on the very early Marx. Angelidis argues that the analysis of rights relates to the cooperative character of the labour process and the manner in which this process is denied by the social form of capitalist society. The article by Helmut Reichelt also goes back to the very early Marx, namely to his doctoral thesis on Democritus and Epicurus. By tracing the ambiguities of Marx on the question of consciousness of the philosopher as theorising subject (and therefore his own consciousness), from the doctoral thesis to the later work, Reichelt seeks to establish the nature of Marx's dialectic and especially to understand why Marx did not supply an explicit account of his own conception of dialectics and of the dialectical exposition of categories.

The papers by Wilding and Psychopedis address the critique of the social sciences. Adrian Wilding's discussion of the ‘posthistorical’ analysis linked with postmodernism and the end of history debate leads him back to a consideration of Marx's concept of historical time and to the analysis of the genesis of homogeneous, abstract labour time, which, he argues, is the basis of the concepts of causality and predictability constructed by both the natural and the social sciences. Kosmas Psychopedis addresses the shortcomings of scientistic and relativist types of explanation in the social sciences. He takes the concepts of indeterminacy and contingency used by such theories and turns them back against the theories by showing their critical content. Against the background of a discussion of the Enlightenment understanding of causality and explanation, he assesses the crisis of the theory of explanation in the social sciences, focusing especially on Weber and on post-Keynesian thought.

The last two papers, by Holloway and Bonefeld, are concerned with overcoming the dualist separation between objectivity and subjectivity. John Holloway argues that the orthodox tradition is fatally weakened as a theory of struggle by a dualistic separation between the ‘objective’ (the movement of capital) and the ‘subjective’ (struggle). For him the only possible way in which this dualism can be overcome is genetically, by understanding the subject as producing the object. Werner Bonefeld also focuses on the issue of human practice, and particularly on the way in which practice is conceptualised in structuralist and autonomist approaches. He proposes to go beyond the dualist separation between objectivity and subjectivity and explores this issue by reference to the work of Max Horkheimer and the goal of a society where humans exist not as a resource but as a purpose.

All the contributions are attempts to colour a picture, to put together a jigsaw which is still in the making, to create a territory which has yet to be explored. The task is clear and desperately urgent: to open a theoretical tradition which has tended to become closed and dogmatic, a tradition which, despite all its tragic history, remains the most powerful tradition of negative thinking that exists.

• 1We wish to thank Peter Burnham for his advice and criticism.
• 2 We have explored this issue in our introduction to volume II of Open Marxism. See also the contributions by R. Gunn; H. Cleaver; J. Fracchia and Ch. Ryan; and J. Holloway in volume II.
• 3See, for example, the Regulation Approach associated with Aglietta (A Theory of Capitalist Regulation, Verso, London, 1979) and the debate on Post-Fordism (Hirsch, 'Fordism and Post-Fordism' and Jessop, 'Polar Bears and Class Struggle'; both published in W. Bonefeld and J. Holloway (eds.), Post-Fordism and Social Form, Macmillan, London, 1991). Stuart Hall's (Road to Renewal, Verso, London, 1988) demand that the Left should learn from 'Thatcherism' is symptomatic.
• 4Scholarly work is seen here, following Agnoli, as negation of all alienated social relations. See Agnoli, 'Destruction as the Determination of the Scholar in Miserable Times', Common Sense, no. 12, Edinburgh, 1992.
• 5Hegel makes the same point: 'Inasmuch as the new true object issues from it, this dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object, is precisely what is called experience' (G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1977).
• 6On this issue see Bonefeld's contribution to volume I of Open Marxism and Gunn's 'Against Historical Materialism' in volume II.

Foreword

Werner Bonefeld

The previous three volumes of Open Marxism were published between 1992 and 1995. What a time that was! The Soviet Empire had collapsed, and with great fanfare capitalism was duly celebrated as not only victorious but also as the epitome of civilisation that had now been confirmed as history’s end – as if history maintains a class of dispossessed producers of surplus value in the service of vast wealth. ‘History’ does not pursue its own ends and it does not assert itself in the interests of bourgeois civilisation, morality and profitability. ‘History’ does not make society. Nor does it take sides. History as it actually unfolded was no history in any meaningful sense. It does not unfold. It is rather that, in the pursuit of their own interests, definite human beings make history, just as they make society. What eventually unfolded is what endures in the present. History was truly made in the late 1980s and early 1990s. About this there is no doubt.

Amidst the fanfare, the debt crisis of the 1980s had started to move from the global South to the global North, from the crash of 1987 via the third global recession in less than 20 years in the early 1990s to the various currency crises, including those of the British Pound and the Mexican Peso in 1992 and 1994 respectively. The Peso crisis coincided with the uprising of the Zapatistas in 1994. Then there was the emergence of China as a world power, founded on a labour economy that combined, and continues to combine, authoritarian government with the provision of cheap labour and disciplined labour relations. It was the time of the first Gulf War, the mere posturing of deadly might in search of a global enemy that was needed to secure the domestic containment of the ‘querulous rabble’, as Hegel put it when he remarked on how a successful war can check domestic unrest and consolidate the power of the state at home.

Since the early 1990s, with the passing into oblivion of the Soviet Empire, the entire edifice of Marxism-Leninism has crumbled. It had served as the official doctrine and the source of legitimation for state socialism and its various derivative ideologies that found expression in Gramscian or Althusserian Eurocommunism or in the manifold sectarian organisations that proclaimed their allegiance to Trotsky, Lenin’s military commander and suppressor of the Kronstadt uprising of 1921, and bearer of an anti-Stalinist Lenin. Although these traditions continue to force themselves onto the critique of political economy, their history has come to an end. They no longer provide the ideological foundation for what is now yesterday’s idea of the forward march of state socialism. To be sure, some still believe in the revolutionary party as a means of socialist transformation. Yet, in reality, the party is no more – it had in fact been a mirage for a long time. It died in Spain during the Civil War and during the show trails in Stalinist Russia, and its morbid foundation perished finally in either 1953 or 1956, or indeed 1968. Like Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France is just a ghost of yesterday. Neither is a Chávez or a Maduro, or indeed an Ortega – and that is a relief. Both Corbyn and Mélenchon seek political power for the sake of justice in an unjust world. Instead of the critique of political economy, the endeavour now is to moralise, and lament by way of political philosophy conceptions of well-being.

In distinction, the Open Marxism volumes did not argue for justice in an unjust world by means of Leninist forms of state socialist planning of a labour economy or of social democratic reforms of a capitalist labour economy through progressive schemes of taxation and just ideas for redistribution. Nor did they argue in favour of hegemonic strategies for the achievement of political power on behalf of the many. They did not endorse the state as the institution of institutions. Rather, they understood that the production and realisation of surplus value is the purpose of capital and that the state is the political form of that purpose. The contributors to those volumes also understood that world market competition compels each nation state to achieve competitive labour markets, which are the condition for achieving a measure of social integration. The politics of competitiveness, sound money, fiscal prudence, enhanced labour productivity, belong to a system of wealth that sustains the welfare of workers on the condition that their labour yields a profit. In this system of wealth, the profitability of labour is a means not only of avoiding bankruptcy. It is also a means of sustaining the employment of labour, allowing workers to maintain access to the means of subsistence through wage income.

There is a fate far worse than being an exploited worker, and that is to be an unexploitable worker. If labour power cannot be traded, what else can be sold to make a living and achieve a connection to the means of subsistence? First, the producers of surplus value, dispossessed sellers of labour power, are free to struggle to make ends meet. Their struggle belongs to the conceptuality of capitalist wealth – that is, money that yields more money. In this conception of wealth, the satisfaction of human needs is a mere sideshow. What counts is the time of money. What counts therefore is the valorisation of value through the extraction of surplus value. There is no time to spare. Time is money. And then suddenly society finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence to the class that works for its supper. Second, the understanding of the mysterious character of an equivalent exchange between unequal values, of money that yields more money, lies in the concept of surplus value. There is the purchase of labour power, and then the consumption of labour that produces a total value that is greater than the value of labour power. The equivalent exchange relations are thus founded on the class relationship between the buyers of labour power and the producers of surplus value. This social relationship, which entails a history of suffering, vanishes in its economic appearance as an exchange between one quantity of money and another.

Contrary to a whole history of Marxist thought, class struggle is not something positive. Rather, it suffuses the capitalist social relations and drives them forward. Class struggle does not follow some abstract idea. Nor does it express some ontologically privileged position of the working class, according to which it is the driving force of historical progress as the traditions of state socialism saw it. Rather, it is a struggle for access to the means of subsistence. It is a struggle to make ends meet and a struggle for human significance, for life-time, and for human warmth and for affection. There is no doubt that the demand for a politics of justice recognises the suffering of the dispossessed. Political commitment towards the betterment of the conditions of the working class is absolutely necessary – it civilises society’s treatment of its workers. Nevertheless, the critique of class society does not find its positive resolution in the achievement of fair and just exchange relations between the sellers of labour power and the consumers of labour. What is a fair wage? Is it not the old dodge of the charitable alternative to the employer from hell, who nevertheless also pays his labourers with the monetised surplus value he previously extracted from them? The critique of class society finds its positive resolution only in a society in which the progress of the ‘muck of ages’ has come to an end.

The Open Marxism volumes of the 1990s saw themselves as a contribution to the attempt at freeing the critique of the capitalist labour economy from the dogmatic embrace of the bright-side view that it is an irrationally organised labour economy. In this view, state socialism is superior to capitalism because it was assumed to be a rationally organised labour economy, based on conscious planning by public authority. The anticapitalism of central economic planning – or, in today’s flat enunciation of Negri and Hardt’s term the multitude, the politics for the many – is entirely abstract in its critique of labour economy. In fact, it presents the theology of anticapitalism – one that looks on the bright side in the belief that progress will be made upon the taking of government by the party of labour. Anticapitalist theology does not grasp capitalist society. It mystifies it. What is capitalist wealth, what belongs to its concept, how is it produced and what is its dynamic, what holds sway in its concept and what therefore is its conceptuality? Only a reified consciousness can declare that it is in possession of the requisite knowledge and technical expertise for regulating capitalism in the interests of the class that works. The Open Marxism volumes sought to reassert the critique of capitalist social relations as a critique of political economy, of both labour economy and the principle of political power – at least that was the critical intention.

The earlier volumes were also an intervention to free Marx from the ‘perverters of historical materialism’, as Adorno had characterised the doctrinal Marxists in Negative Dialectics. For this to happen, looking on the bright side is not an option. Rather, it entails an attempt at thinking in and through the conceptuality of capitalist wealth, which asserts itself as an independent subject behind the backs of acting social individuals that nevertheless, and critically so, endow it with a consciousness and a will through their social practice. In the absence of such an attempt at understanding the conceptuality of real economic abstractions, the struggle of the working class, which belongs to the concept of capital and sustains its progress, will not be understood. Instead, it will either be romanticised as alienated labour in revolt or viewed, with moralising righteousness, as an electoral resource.

The said purpose of the attempt at freeing Marx from the orthodox ritualization of the labour economy was not in any case novel. In fact, it could look back onto a distinguished history that included the council communism of, for example, Pannekoek, Gorter and Mattick; the work of Karl Korsch; the critical theory of Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin and Marcuse; the Yugoslav Praxis Group; Axelos’s open Marxism; the Situationist International; the critical Marxist tradition in Latin America associated with Bolivar Echeverría, Sánchez Vázquez, Schwarz and Arantes; the state derivation debate of, amongst others, Gerstenberger, Blanke, Neußüss, and von Braunmühl; the neue Marx Lektüre of, amongst others, Backhaus, Reichelt and Schmidt; the autonomous Marxism of, amongst others, Dalla Costa, Federici, Caffentzis, Tronti, Negri, Cleaver and Bologna; and, in the context of the British-based Conference of Socialist Economists from which it emerged, the works of especially Simon Clarke and John Holloway about value, class and state. Clarke’s critique of structuralist Marxism, especially the works of Lévi-Strauss, Althusser and Poulantzas, and his contributions to state theory and value-form analysis, were fundamental in the immediate context of the early 1990s.

The title Open Marxism derived from the work of Johannes Agnoli, a Professor of the Critique of Politics at the Free University of Berlin. His contribution to the heterodox Marxist tradition focused the critique of political economy as a subversive critique of the economic categories, the philosophical concepts, the moral values and the political institutions, including the form of the state, of bourgeois society. The direct link between the title of the Open Marxism volumes and Agnoli is the title of a book that he published with Ernest Mandel in 1980: Offener Marxismus: Ein Gespräch über Dogmen, Orthodoxie & die Häresie der Realität (Open Marxism: A Discussion about Doctrines, Orthodoxy & the Heresy of Reality). The choice of the Open Marxism title was not about paying homage to Johannes Agnoli as the foremost subversive thinker of his time. It was programmatic.

The much too long delayed publication of this fourth volume of Open Marxism does not require contextualisation. Nothing is as it was and everything is just the same. We live in a time of terror and we live in a time of war. The so-called elite has become a racket, which it in fact had been all along. Antisemitism is back en vogue as both the socialism of fools and as the expression of thoughtless resentment and nationalist paranoia. Racism is as pervasive as it always was – as enemy within and without. Gender has become liberal. Feminism no longer disintegrates society as it once promised. The so-called clash of civilisations is unrelenting in its inexorable attack on the promise of freedom. Even the talk about socialism in one country has made a comeback without a sense of purpose – first because there can be none, second because there is none, and third because there never was one. The political blowback of the crisis of 2008 has been intense and relentless: Austerity. Precariat. Profitability. Rate of growth. Price competitiveness. What is so different from the early 1990s, however, is that capitalism as a term of critical inquiry has vanished; it has disappeared from contemporary analysis. The Zeitgeist identifies neoliberalism as the object of critique. As a consequence, the past no longer comes alive in the critique of contemporary conditions. Instead, it appears as a counterfoil of imagined civility to today’s much-criticised neoliberal world. The critique of neoliberalism conjures up a time in which money did not yield more money but was rather put to work for growth and jobs. Illusion dominates reality. The spectre of society without memory is truly frightening.

While the first three volumes of Open Marxism sought to free Marx from the dogmatic perverters of historical materialism, it seems to me that the purpose of this fourth volume is to bring back centre-stage the critique of capitalism, in part to re-establish in a (self-)critical and open manner what the neoliberal Zeitgeist disavows, and in part also to think afresh of what it means to say no. On the one hand, there is the preponderance of the object – society as a real abstraction that manifests itself behind the backs of the acting social subjects – and, on the other hand, there is the spontaneity of society as subject – a subject of its own objective dialectics of the forces and relations of production, but a subject nevertheless.

Hope is the true idealism in a world that asserts itself behind the backs of the acting subjects, mere personifications of the economic categories. What is the objective truth of the economic thing? The given world of economic compulsion requires the active intervention of the thinking subject for its comprehension, in order to release the truth which it contains. For Adorno, the most eloquent elements of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, its truth content, are the ‘wounds which the conflict in the theory leaves behind’ (Adorno 1965: 84). The promise of utopia lies in the ‘breaks’ (Brüche) in its logic and in the gaps in its systematic unity. These cracks, as Holloway refers to them in Crack Capitalism (2010), disclose the ‘traces’ (Bloch) of utopia already experienced in the present. Only in these ‘traces’ is there ‘hope of ever coming across genuine and just reality’ (Adorno 1973: 325). Idealism is the true realism – to the science of economic objectivity, the glimpse of what could be appears as a mere metaphysical distraction.

The point of Open Marxism is to interpret the preponderance of society as economic object – not to reject it abstractly and wilfully. Rather, the point of interpretation is to disclose its truth content. Only society as subject has the capacity for deciphering and for refusing to accept the logic that holds sway in the economic object. Non-conformity is the signature of society as subject. However, this does not mean that the truth content lies in the universality of the human being as the hidden secret of the economic world, as Backhaus (2005) suggests. The point is rather to enter into society as economic object, to think in and through it, in order to establish its social nature – ‘to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized’ (Marx 1990: 484, fn. 4). The primacy of interpretation is not a substitute for praxis but a preventative against a false praxis and thus a precondition for change.

Let me conclude with reference to Adorno’s Negative Dialectics because it contains the memory of Auschwitz. Adorno reformulates Kant’s categorical imperative into the principle ‘to arrange one’s thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen’ (1990: 365). Society as object does nothing. It does not maim, kill and gas. ‘It is man, rather, the real, living man who does all that’, and, in so doing, bestows society as object with a deadly will (paraphrasing Marx, as cited in Negative Dialectics). Finally, and however debased as personifications of real economic abstractions, ‘there would be nothing without individuals and their spontaneities’ (Adorno 1990: 304). Hope dies last.

Werner Bonefeld
York
26 March 2019

References
Adorno, T. W. (1965) Noten zur Literatur, Vol. 3, Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T. W. (1973) ‘Die Aktualität der Philosophie’, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1, Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, T. W. (1990) Negative Dialectics, London: Routledge.
Backhaus, H. (2005) ‘Some Aspects of Marx’s Concept of Critique in the Context of his Economic-Philosophical Theory’, in W. Bonefeld and K. Psychopedis (eds), Human Dignity: Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism, Aldershot: Ashgate.
Holloway, J. (2010) Crack Capitalism, London: Pluto Press.
Marx, K. (1990) Capital, Vol. 1, London: Penguin.

Introduction: Open Marxism
Against a Closing World

Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, Alfonso García Vela,
Edith González and John Holloway

We write against a closing of the world. Walls are going up around us. The wall on the USA border with Mexico, the walls that UK Brexiteers would build, the walls being constructed by left and right nationalisms all over the world: walls of exclusion, of borders, often walls of hatred, walls of pain. Intellectually and academically too, walls are going up around us. In the universities (where the four of us work), the walls of academic correctness are growing bigger: the pressures of competition, insecurity and the precarity of academic work, combined with quality assurance committees, lists of indexed journals and quantitative criteria of assessment, make it harder, especially for students and young academics, to write what they want to write. To say what they want to say. The disciplines of the social sciences are becoming just that: disciplines. While resistance struggles continue and expand outside academic walls, critical thought is being squeezed out of the universities, reframed in innocuous forms or simply sidelined. Gradually, often without us noticing it, critical terms become taboo. They become ‘durty words’ (Brunetta and O’Shea 2018). Increasingly, these durty words begin to be whispered, until they fall out of use altogether. ‘Revolution’ is the most obvious one, but also ‘class struggle’, and ‘capital’ too. The more atrocious the barbarity of patriarchal and colonial capitalism becomes, the less we can name it.

Radical thought has not come to an end though. Not at all. The critique of capital exists. But it survives mainly in the shadow of the criticism of the forms of expression of capital: authoritarianism, neoliberalism, the financialisation of the economy, policy failure, the crisis of representative democracy, etc. We write against the closure of the world, then, because we see a danger in some of the present struggles today: that we only demand regulation, job creation, distributive justice, transparent democracy, etc. In our view, these criticisms and demands are necessary and important but they are incomplete without a critique of capital (see González, in this volume). With the intensification of the fetishisation of social relations, emancipation looks like a ghost that everyone laughs at. Talking about emancipation becomes simply absurd. The idea of a ‘society where “the development of each is the condition for the development of all”’ (see Gunn and Wilding, in this volume) seems meaningless. In recent years, and particularly since the financial crisis of 2008, capital has become simultaneously more abstract and more aggressive. Neo-fascism, war, xenophobia, feminicide, racism, ecocide, and repression against all resistances around the world – you name it – signal a world enclosed by walls. This is now a world ‘without a Front’ (Bloch cited by Amsler 2016: 26). Instead of ‘being the place of becoming of “the world, of world process”’ (Bloch cited by Amsler 2016: 26), a world without a front is a world where hope is constantly diminished, misinterpreted as fantasy or optimism, or dismissed for building castles in the air when we need to discuss the ‘urgency’ of today’s world crisis (see Dinerstein, in this volume). Is there no way out? The institutional left offers an alternative: ‘Vote for us’. But is this institutional hope a real alternative? Or it is a way to save capitalism from itself? (Holloway, Nasioka and Doulos 2019). The alternative offered by institutional hope is a short-term promise of ‘controlling’ capitalists and producing a capitalism with a human face, for the many. But how? When trying to answer this simple question, institutional hope collapses against the walls of a reality where the frenetic logic of capital and the command of money over life prevails. For us, as Bonefeld suggests in his Foreword to this volume, ‘looking on the bright side is not an option’.

Marxism is an insolent word. But to retain its insolence, it must constantly be reinvented. It must spit against the horrors of capitalism but, to do that, it must also reject the closed dogmas of its own tradition. The notion of open Marxism has been outlined in the introduction to Open Marxism 1 (Bonefeld et al. 1992a). The term appeared for the first time in 1980, in the publication of a debate between Johannes Agnoli and Ernst Mandel about Marx’s critique of political economy titled Offener Marxismus. Offener Marxismus became a project of opening up the categories of Marxist thought, and more (see Bonefeld’s Foreword). Open Marxism was set up as a new form of understanding the categories developed by Marx, especially in Capital, not as predetermined laws but as conceptualisations of class struggle(s). Against the old dichotomy of class struggle and laws of capitalist development, open Marxism challenged Marxists, radical intellectuals and activists to explore money, capital, the state, the law, and so on, as forms of struggle from above and, therefore, open to resistance and rebellion. A key aspect of open Marxism is then to negate both capitalist society as well as the dogmatic closure of its categories. The focus is on critique, a critique that investigates the internal contradictions of capital which assert themselves as both theory and struggle. As the editors of Open Marxism 1 stated in their introduction, ‘critique is open in as much as it involves a reciprocal interrelation between the categories of theory [which interrogates practice] and of practice [which constitutes the framework for critique]’ (Bonefeld et al. 1992a: xi).

The open Marxists’ critique has had a substantial impact on the rethinking of Marxism in the twenty-first century, especially but not exclusively in Europe and Latin America, and several books have emerged from the approach,1 which has generated many reviews, debates and criticisms. These range from general evaluations of the open Marxist interpretations of Marx’s theory, theory of the state, global capital and class struggle, critical theory, social form and human praxis.2

This volume continues the work initiated by open Marxism in the 1990s. Its aims are no different from the previous three volumes: to (re)think how to break the descent into barbarism; to break capital by venturing through a theoretical exploration to free the critique of capitalist labour economy from economic dogmas (see Bonefeld’s Foreword); to open up to the movement of struggle and to understand itself as part of that movement. That, for us, is the project of open Marxism, and is why we are presenting this collection of essays as the fourth volume of Open Marxism. We regard Marxism as an emancipatory theory, a theory of struggle, rather than as an objective analysis of capitalist domination. As John Holloway highlights elsewhere, ‘to speak of struggle is to speak of the openness of social development; to think of Marxism as a theory of struggle is to think of Marxist categories as open categories, categories which conceptualise the openness of society’ (1993: 76). To Marx, ‘[t]he critique of social forms ... amounts to a critique of economic categories on a human basis and it does so by returning the constituted forms of the economic categories to “relations between humans”’ (Bonefeld in Bieler et al. 2006: 178). We endorse what the editors of Open Marxism 2 two expressed in their introduction:

the openness of categories – an openness on to practice – obtains as a reflexive critique of ideologies and social phenomena, which, for their part, exist as moments of historically asserted forms of class struggle … Open Marxism insists on the antagonistic nature of social existence. This being so, the Marxist understanding of a unity of theory and praxis entails not the theoretical suppression of class struggle, but the invocation of class struggle as the movement of the contradiction in which capital, itself, consists. (Bonefeld, Gunn and Psychopedis 1992b: xi and xii)

Openness means openness of categories, of debates, of our hearts, of spaces for critique, of fronts of political possibility (Amsler 2016; Dinerstein, in this volume).

This fourth volume of Open Marxism gives fresh impetus to the intertwining of theoretical discussion and radical, anticapitalist practice with a selection of authors that we consciously sought to include: not only the established names associated with open Marxism but also a new wave or second generation of open Marxists. The fact that this new generation includes a high proportion of women and Latin Americans says much about the way that rebellion and rebellious thought have been moving in recent years. Our aim is that open Marxism should be open to the changing flows of struggle, although it must be admitted that the reference lists of the various chapters remain heavily dominated by white men.

The contributions to this volume were inspired by the broad idea of ‘open Marxism against a closing world’, but the authors were left free to decide how to contribute to it. This editorial decision responds to the aim to discover and present to the reader some of the open Marxists’ theoretical developments and political concerns of the past two decades. We have grouped the eleven chapters that follow around three main subjects: open Marxism and critical theory (Part I; global capital, the nation state and the capitalist crisis (Part II; and democracy, revolution and emancipation (Part III).

In past decades, there has been a renewed interest from journalists, academics and activists in exploring the meaning and the authority of Marx’s work today. Yet, as Hudis and Anderson highlight in their introduction to Dunayevskaya’s Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx, ‘one surprising feature of much of the current return to Marx … is the relative silence on Hegel and the dialectic’ (2002: xv). In the opening essay of this collection, Richard Gunn and Adrian Wilding return to Hegel to recover the revolutionary notion of ‘mutual recognition’ as theorised by Marx and – before him – Hegel. Gunn and Wilding argue that the recuperation of the notion of mutual recognition is one of the ways to renew an ‘open’ Marxism in the twentieth century. For them, recognition can become a unifying theoretical and uniting principle of the Left. By exploring Marx’s discussion of the term against the setting of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the authors underline the common revolutionary impulse of both Marx and Hegel, and how they uncover the contradictory forms which recognition takes on in a world of domination and institutional alienation.

One of the central concerns of open Marxism has been, and still is, Marx’s notion of the unity between theory and praxis. Following Bonefeld et al., Marxist orthodoxy takes this unity as ‘referring to the “field of application” ... and is reflected in the separation between the logic of capital, on the one hand, and social practice, in the other’ (Bonefeld et al. 1995: 2). The next four contributions by Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, Alfonso García Vela, Mario Schäbel and Frederick Harry Pitts speak to this problematic in different ways, addressing the contributions of Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, open Marxism and the New Reading of Marx (NRM) to the theorisation of the relation between object(ivity) and subject(ivity) in our understanding of radical change. In Chapter 2, Ana C. Dinerstein re-evaluates the place of the theoretical in today’s praxis. By pointing to the sphere of social reproduction as the ‘site’ of both new forms of class struggle and the renewal of critical theory, Dinerstein argues that critical theory today should be based on Bloch’s philosophy of hope. Despite the critical theorist’s fear of the positivisation of social struggles, Dinerstein argues that the fight against barbarism is not only possible but already exists in the form of struggles for alternative forms of life. In a context of the crisis of social reproduction, these struggles should not be regarded as positive: they are critical affirmations that affirm life as a form of negating a totality of destruction in a ‘contradictory’ manner (see Gunn 1994). To her, while Adorno’s negative dialectics (Adorno 1995) remarkably prevents dialectical closure of the capitalist totality from taking place theoretically, negative dialectics cannot open onto a ‘world with Front’ in practice. And this is what is needed today.

Alfonso García Vela opens his chapter with the assertion that open Marxism does enable us to overcome the positive conceptualisation of dialectics, totality and emancipation typical of orthodox Marxism, with practical relevance for anticapitalist struggles. However, referring mainly to John Holloway’s work, he claims that open Marxism has not yet solved the problem of the separation between subject and object, between structure and struggle. He points to what he calls the open Marxist’s ‘subjectivist’ position, which conceives of the object only as a mode of existence of the subject. This, argues García Vela, can be regarded as a voluntarist perspective on emancipation. According to the author, this contrasts with Adorno’s primacy of the object which contests the subjectivism of modern thought and therefore opens the possibility of rethinking the dichotomy between structure and struggle beyond subjectivism, without relapsing into the objectivist position represented by structuralism. Also, for García Vela, the transformation of the world requires the self-reflection of critical thought, because critical thought is not separated from capitalist society but emanates from it. An important aspect of Adorno’s negative dialectics is that it calls to the self-reflection of thinking. So, if the critical theory of open Marxism wants to contribute to changing the world it must undertake self-reflection. Otherwise, it runs the risk of its reification.

In Chapter 4, Frederick Harry Pitts highlights open Marxism’s critical contribution to value-form analysis. To be sure, orthodox economics cannot grasp the real problem of the expansion of ‘money as command’ (Cleaver 1996), because their ‘abstract abstractions’ try to ‘get rid of contradictions in definitions’ in such a way that economic categories do not explicate ‘the phenomenon from which the economic abstraction comes’ (Ilyenkov 2008: 243, 103). Open Marxists follow Marx in his critique of ‘abstract’ or ‘formal’ abstractions, and work with determinate abstractions insofar as they embody the contradictions of the real movement of struggle. As Gunn suggests, ‘if it is a “theory of” anything, Marxism is a theory of contradiction’ (1994: 53). ‘Without contradiction’, argues Bonefeld, ‘inhuman forces like Capital and Money, are naturalised and the economy becomes something superior, unmanageable, as existing above us, like God’ (2016: 235). Pitts’s assessment of open Marxism’s contribution to value-form analysis makes exactly this point: while for the NRM ‘the validity of economic categories such as labour and value does not hold in abstraction from society as whole’, for open Marxism value is a historical – contradictory – process based on class struggle. To Pitts, while both open Marxism and the NRM offer a ‘radically open and non-dogmatic unfinished project’, open Marxism should be valued for having restated the centrality of class struggle at the core of the NRM’s ‘monetary’ theory of value.

In Chapter 5, Mario Schäbel also discusses the work of the NRM, exploring its synergies with open Marxism. However, his focus is on the association of open Marxism with Adorno’s negative dialectics. Schäbel enquires whether open Marxists can be regarded as the successors of Adorno’s critical theory or not. His analysis suggests that open Marxism can only be considered an offspring of the Frankfurt School in connection to Herbert Marcuse’s subjective idealism rather than Adorno’s critical materialism, the latter having been embraced by scholars of the NRM. Unlike Pitts, Schäbel does not regard either open Marxism’s rejection of the primacy of the object over the subject, or its restatement of class struggle at the core of the analysis of capital and the value-form, as contributions that could ‘fix’ the NRM’s ‘objective’ analysis of capital. To Schäbel, open Marxism’s closeness to Marcuse’s critical theory, rather than Adorno’s, risks replacing ‘the dogmatic and one-sided materialism of orthodox Marxism with an equally dogmatic and one-sided idealism based on granting the subject absolute primacy in the context of the dialectical unity of subject and object’.

The next two chapters offer innovative critical approaches to two of the traditional concerns of open Marxism: global capital and the state, and the crisis of the accumulation of capital. In Chapter 6, Sagrario Anta Martínez joins those who have challenged the adequacy of Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation today (Dalla Costa 1995; Harvey 2005; Bonefeld 2008; De Angelis 2008), particularly when the context is the possibly terminal crisis of capital (see Ortlieb 2008; Kurz 2010). She suggests that as a ‘system of social organisation’ capitalism does not ensure the reproduction of the human life, but quite the opposite: it is destroying the sources of social reproduction, and therefore leading to a crisis of the latter (see Dinerstein, in this volume). Anta Martínez offers the term ‘terminary accumulation’, as opposed to primitive accumulation, to suggest that, in the current global situation, talk of primitive accumulation is simply anachronistic. With ‘terminary accumulation’ in mind, she then explores the antagonism between capital and life and the limits of the former as a form of social organisation. In Chapter 7, Rodrigo Pascual and Luciana Ghiotto examine the established idea in the discipline of International Political Economy (IPE) that the state possesses territorial foundations, while capital maintains itself as global, free and non-territorial. Their analysis – which connects open Marxism’s recent contributions to long-term debates about the relation between the state, multinational corporations and imperialism – demonstrates that the realist perspective in IPE embraces this partition, which is based on the analysis of the two moments in the process of accumulation of capital: production, which requires territoriality, and circulation, which does not. However, Pascual and Ghiotto challenge this separation and argue that territoriality and non-territoriality are not attributes of the state and capital respectively, but a result of class antagonism. Territoriality and globality imprint a tension in the domain of class exploitation, and this can only be resolved temporarily within the territorial contours of the State.

The third and final part of the book concerns democracy, revolution and emancipation. In Chapter 8, Katherina Nasioka traces the effects of the capitalist crisis since the 1970s, and the shifts that are observed in class struggle as a result of this ongoing crisis. She argues that the anticapitalist struggle today displays two mutually contradicting dynamics which reflect the intensity of the capitalist crisis and the sharpening of contradictions in the capital relation. On the one hand, the twentieth-century’s dominant form of political organisation of the working class, hegemonised by the labour movement and guided by the Leninist canon, is hard to assert in the present-day context. On the other hand, the contemporary struggles against capital, which are defensive in most cases, are often fought in the name of ‘we, the workers’, looking for class unity in those categories that have built the identity of the labour movement in the past, e.g. the nation, the state. Therefore, while organisation based on the working class is debilitated, the lack of class unity is challenging the prospect of revolution. Nasioka asks, then: how can new struggles be translated into a political prospect that goes against-and-beyond capitalist society? In Chapter 9, Sergio Tischler might provide a plausible response to Nasioka by bringing the case of the Zapatista movement (Chiapas, Mexico) into the discussion of revolution today.3 Tischler suggests that Zapatismo has not been a simple revolutionary movement of a local character, but has implied a shaking of contemporary revolutionary thought on such fundamental issues as the relationship between Marxism and the revolution today. Zapatismo offers a critique of the Leninist canon of revolution, that is, of the revolutionary subject conceived typically from the perspectives of vanguard and hegemony. The relevance of the Zapatistas’ autonomy lies in it being a practical criticism of the idea of the vertical and state-centric subject of the anticapitalist transformation. Through the images and practice of Zapatismo, a space and a political-conceptual process was opened that can lead to a re-conceptualisation of the anticapitalist struggle.

In Chapter 10, Edith González starts with a critical reflection on the place that democracy occupies in left thinking today. She is concerned about a shift that has taken place in that thinking from revolution to democracy, and the political consequences that this bears for any process of emancipation. González argues that democracy has become the central theme in both critical analyses of the past decade and in social movements and grassroots political discourse and practice. To be sure, Occupy Wall Street and social movements in Argentina have become symbols of resistance against capitalism. These movements have reinvented radical democracy by means of a new ‘horizontalism’ (Sitrin 2006; 2012). They are regarded as agents of the prefiguration of a new democracy (Brissette 2013; Teivainen 2016). But are these movements aware of the limits of the use of the concept of ‘democracy’ without a critique of capital? To González, the equality that democracy can promise in a capitalist society is, in fact, an abstraction of inequality. Therefore, the question is: ‘what is the power of the anticapitalist “democratic” struggle without a critique of capital?’ The concept of capital, argues John Holloway in the final chapter of the book, is crucial for understanding the present situation of the world. Here, Holloway engages with the categorisation of his open Marxist approach as being ‘subjectivist’ (see Schäbel and García Vela, in this volume). Using ‘the train’ as a metaphor for the inherently expansive and destructive nature of capital, Holloway claims that capital is not a pure object for the domination of the subject. Rather, capital ‘is a struggle’. It is clear that we have produced ‘the train’, he argues; that is, the train is a ‘social construct’, and it became ‘objectified’ as the dominant form of social relations ‘through bloody struggles’. Capital has its own rules. However, the problem starts when we ‘understand capital simply as a form of domination (as capital-logicians and New Readers of Marx tend to do)’. Holloway suggests that while the ‘primacy of the object’ characterises capital, it is precisely that which we must break. There is a dissonance in the relation between subject and object: ‘The presence of the object within the subject has been much emphasised, but what interests us more is the destructive force of the subject within the object, the presence of the subject in-against-and-beyond the object as its crisis.’

References
Adorno, T. W. (2000) Introduction to Sociology, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Adorno, T. W. (1995) Negative Dialectics, London: Continuum.
Amsler, S. (2016) ‘Learning Hope: An Epistemology of Possibility for Advanced Capitalist Society’, in A. C. Dinerstein (ed.), Social Sciences for An-Other Politics: Women Theorising without Parachutes, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 19–32.
Best, B., Bonefeld, W. and O’Kane, C. (eds) (2018) The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, 3 vols, London: Sage.
Bieler, A. and Morton, A. (2003) ‘Globalisation, the State and Class Struggle: A “Critical Economy” Engagement with Open Marxism’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 5(4): 467–99.
Bieler, A., Bonefeld, W., Burnham, P. and Morton, A. (2006) Global Restructuring, State, Capital and Labour: Contesting Neo-Gramscian Perspectives, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Boldyrev, I. (2015) Ernst Bloch and his Contemporaries: Locating Utopian Messianism Today, London: Bloomsbury.
Bonefeld, W. (2008) ‘The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation: Commodity Fetishism and Social Constitution’, in W. Bonefeld (ed.), Subverting the Present, Imagining the Future, New York: Autonomedia, 51–66.
Bonefeld, W. (2010) ‘Abstract Labour: Against its Nature and on its Time’, Capital & Class 34(2): 257–76.
Bonefeld, W. (2014) Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason, London: Bloomsbury.
Bonefeld, W. (2016) ‘Bringing Critical Theory Back in at a Time of Misery: Three Beginnings Without Conclusion’, Capital & Class 40(2): 233–44.
Bonefeld, W. and Holloway, J. (eds) (1995) Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bonefeld, W. and Psychopedis, K. (2005) Human Dignity: Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism, New York: Routledge.
Bonefeld, W. and Tischler, S. (2002) What is to be Done? Leninism, Anti-Leninist Marxism and the Question of Revolution Today, New York: Routledge.
Bonefeld, W., Holloway, J. and Tischler, S. (eds) (2005) Marxismo Abierto. Una visión Europea y Latinoamericana, Vol. 2, Buenos Aires/Puebla: Ediciones Herramienta & Universidad Benemérita Autónoma de Puebla.
Bonefeld, W., Gunn, R. and Psychopedis K. (eds) (1992a) Open Marxism 1, London: Pluto Press.
Bonefeld, W., Gunn, R. and Psychopedis, K. (eds) (1992b) Open Marxism 2, London: Pluto Press.
Bonefeld, W., Gunn, R., Holloway, J. and Psychopedis, K. (eds) (1995) Open Marxism 3, London: Pluto Press.
Brissette, E. (2013) ‘Prefiguring the Realm of Freedom at Occupy Oakland’, Rethinking Marxism 25(2): 218–27.
Bruff, I. (2009) ‘The Totalisation of Human Social Practice: Open Marxists and Capitalist Social Relations, Foucauldians and Power Relations’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 11: 332–51.
Brunetta, V. and O’Shea, K. (eds) (2018) Durty Words, Limerick: Durty Books.
Clarke, S. (ed.) (1991) The State Debate, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Cleaver, H. (1996) ‘The Subversion of Money-as-Command in the Current Crisis’, in W. Bonefeld and J. Holloway (eds), Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 141–77.
Dalla Costa, M. (1995) ‘Capitalism and Reproduction’, in W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn, J. Holloway and K. Psychopedis (eds), Open Marxism 3, London: Pluto Press, 7–16.
De Angelis, M. (2008) ‘Marx and Primitive Accumulation: The Continuous Character of Capital’s Enclosures’, in W. Bonefeld (ed.), Subverting the Present, Imagining the Future, New York: Autonomedia, 27–50.
Dinerstein, A. C. (2012) ‘Interstitial Revolution: The Explosive Fusion of Negativity and Hope’, Capital & Class 36(3): 513–32.
Dinerstein, A. C. (2015) The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Dinerstein, A. C. (ed.) (2016) Social Sciences for An-Other Politics: Women Theorising without Parachutes, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dinerstein, A. C. (2018) ‘John Holloway: A Theory of Interstitial Revolution’, in B. Best, W. Bonefeld and C. O’Kane (eds), The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, London: Sage, 533–49.
Dinerstein, A. C. and Neary, M. (eds) (2002) The Labour Debate, New York: Routledge.
Dinerstein, A. C. and Pitts, F. H. (2018) ‘From Post-work to Post-capitalism? Discussing the Basic Income and Struggles for Alternative Forms of Social Reproduction’, Journal of Labor & Society 21(4): 471–91.
Dönmez P. E. and Sutton, A. (2016) ‘Revisiting the Debate on Open Marxist Perspectives’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 18(3): 688–705.
Eden, D. (2012) Autonomy: Capitalism, Class and Politics, London: Routledge.
Grollios, V. (2017) Negativity and Democracy: Marxism and the Critical Theory Tradition, New York: Routledge.
Grosfoguel, R. (2009) ‘Izquierdas e Izquierdas Otras: Entre el Proyecto de la izquierda eurocéntrica y el Proyecto transmoderno de las nuevas izquierdas decoloniales’, Tabula Rasa 11: 9–29.
Gunn, R. (1994) ‘Marxism and Contradiction’, Common Sense 15: 53–9, https://commonsensejournal.org.uk/1994/04/01/issue-15.
Harvey, D. (2005) The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holloway, J. (1993) ‘Open Marxism, History and Class Struggle’, Common Sense 13: 76–86.
Holloway, J. (1994) ‘The Relevance of Marxism Today’, Common Sense 15: 38–42.
Holloway, J. (2002) Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, London: Pluto Press.
Holloway, J. (2010) Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.
Holloway, J., Matamoros, F. and Tischler, S. (eds) (2009) Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism, London: Pluto Press.
Holloway, J., Nasioka, K. and Doulos, P. (eds) (2019) Beyond Crisis: After the Collapse of the Institutional Hope, What?, San Francisco: PM Press.
Hudis, P. and Anderson, K. L. (2002) ‘Introduction: Raya Dunayevskaya’s Concept of Dialectic’, in R. Dunayevskaya, The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx, ed. P. Hudis and K. Anderson, Lanham: Lexington Books, xv–xlii.
Ilyenkov, E. V. (2008 [1960]) The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital, New Delhi: Aakar Books.
Khasnabish, A. (2008) Zapatismo Beyond Borders: New Imaginations of Political Possibilities, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Kiciloff, A. and Starosta, G. (2011) ‘On Value and Abstract Labour: A Reply to Werner Bonefeld’, Capital & Class 35(2): 295–305.
Kurz, R. (2010) ‘On the Current Global Economic Crisis: Questions and Answers’, in N. Larsen, M. Nilges, J. Robinson and N. Brown (eds) (2014) Marxism and the Critique of Value, Chicago: MCM’, 321–56.
Mandel, E. and Agnoli, J. (1980) Offener Marxismus – Ein Gespräch über Dogmen, Orthodoxie and die Häresie der Realität. Frankfurt: Campus.
Mignolo, W. (2002) ‘The Zapatistas’ Theoretical Revolution: Its Historical, Ethical, and Political Consequences’, Review – Fernand Braudel Center 25(3): 245–75.
Moir, C. (2018) ‘In Defence of Speculative Materialism’, Historical Materialism 1. Online Article, 1–33, doi:10.1163/1569206X-00001609.
Ortlieb, C. P. (2008) ‘A Contradiction Between Matter and Form: On the Significance of the Production of Relative Surplus Value in the Dynamic of Terminal Crisis’, in N. Larsen, M. Nilges, J. Robinson and N. Brown (eds) (2014) Marxism and the Critique of Value, Chicago: MCM’, 77–122.
Sitrin, M. (ed.) (2006) Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina, Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press.
Sitrin, M. (2012) Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina, London and New York: Zed Books.
Susen, S. (2012) ‘“Open Marxism” Against and Beyond the “Great Enclosure”? Reflections on How (Not) to Crack Capitalism’, Journal of Classical Sociology 12(2): 281–331.
Teivainen, T. (2016) ‘Occupy Representation and Democratise Prefiguration: Speaking for Others in Global Justice Movements’, Capital & Class 40(1): 19–36.
Tsolakis, A. (2010) ‘Opening up Open Marxist Theories of the State: A Historical Materialist Critique’,The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 12: 387–407.

• 1Among them, Best, Bonefeld and O’Kane 2018; Bonefeld and Tischler 2002; Bonefeld, Holloway and Tischler 2005; Bonefeld 2014; Dinerstein and Neary 2002; Dinerstein 2015, 2016; Holloway 2002, 2010; Holloway, Matamoros and Tischler 2009; Bonefeld and Psychopedis 2005.
• 2Bieler and Morton 2003; Bruff 2009; Dönmez and Sutton 2016; Tsolakis 2010; Grollios 2017; Kiciloff and Starosta 2011; Eden 2012; Dinerstein 2012, 2018; Susen 2012; several authors in Historical Materialism 13(4), 2005; several authors in Capital & Class 29(1), 2005; and several authors in Herramienta (2002) available at www.herramienta.com.ar/articulo.php?id=34.
• 3On the Zapatista’s theoretical revolution see also Grosfoguel 2009; Khasnabish 2008; and Mignolo 2002, among others.