A Layered Approach to Reading Marx
Posted on December 29, 2014 by stevedarcyThose who still try to engage seriously in the work of reading Marx often find themselves grappling with a number of apparent ambiguities or indeterminacies that seem to inhabit the source materials in advance. Here, I can only mention a few of these, hinting at the scope of the problem:
Is Marx’s “social-scientific socialism” somehow “objective” in the sense of being value-neutral, or is it animated crucially by an interest to “change the world” and oppose injustice?
Is the “dictatorship of the proletariat” a prediction about how capitalism is likely to unravel and be displaced due to acute and escalating conflict between classes, or is it a political strategy proposed as maximally advantageous for those endeavouring (voluntarily, as it were) to effect revolutionary change?
Is the end of capitalism and its displacement by socialism “inevitable,” in a causal sense, or is it desirable (worth wanting), in a normative sense?Readers of Marx, confronted by these
apparent ambiguities or indeterminacies, tend to part company with one another, as different “schools” or “currents” of opinion align in favour of one reading or another, with little prospect of a convergence. There are, for instance, neo-Schmittian Marxists who oppose any notion of normative assessment, in favour of a narrow “Realpolitik” conception of social conflict. And conversely, there are “humanist” Marxists who insist on the fundamentally ethical nature of Marx’s challenge to capitalism and his insistence on the “universality” of the proletarian self-emancipation project. And both seem able to cite passages in Marx (or other classical marxist writers, like Engels, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Lenin, and so on), to support their views.
On one level, this seeming indeterminacy might be OK. Why, after all, should we favour convergence around an unchallenged official version of what Marx had to say? It seems that, whether we look at it in intellectual terms or in political terms, there is little to be gained by seeking to liquidate our differences of interpretation or emphasis. Quite the reverse, in fact: we can expect a greater fruitfulness and fecundity to accompany such conflicts of interpretation.
Nevertheless, it is always better, intellectually and politically, to strive for a sophisticated and mature, rather than a simplistic and naive understanding of any text, tradition, practice or event. And so, in the case of Marxism, we should approach this matter of indeterminacy with a critical and discerning eye, in the hope to shed some light on — if not the “right” version of Marx — at least the roots of our inability to agree about the contours of his theoretical contribution.
