Bourgeois Immaterialisms: The Phantasm of Individualist Subjectivism
At a certain point, Lenin began veering away from Marx and into the deadened Hegelian worship of ideas themselves (such as in his book Empiriocriticism). It becomes clear that first Lenin and later Stalin would lean more toward Hegel than toward Marx’s materialism and would betray the social mechanical monad in Marx’s work. It would be easy to be content with anarchist philosophy if the only problem with Lenin and Stalin were their use of states and embrace of state politics. But the problem with Hegelian pseudo-Marxist revisionism is much bigger! These Hegel loving revisionists began a path that would eventually lead to other types of dangerous liberalism. Lenin and Stalin’s inspiration of Stalinist Antonio Gramsci who would be read by Stewart Hall and later by a range of critical theory scholars, humanities thinkers and critical race theory scholars has led to a dangerous thread of antimaterialism and anti-economism in academic circles. Today both academics in the humanities and Marxists on the fringes are trying to recover materialism from its erosion by the superstructure-before-all-else crowd.
Council Communist Anton Pannekoek correctly diagnosed the problem in his essay Materialism and Historical Materialism as well as his longer book on Lenin’s idealism Lenin As Philosopher. Lenin’s mistake for Pannekoek is the formula which implies that mechanical matter is the origin of spiritual and social forces. Once it is established that spirit and society emerge in a symmetrical birth from mechanical matter as Stalin will later claim, it is sufficient to just have good ideas that preside over the immutable matter of the universe and organize them. The hegelianism here is in thinking that enlightenment is possible if we can only make culture mimic the material. But this is not the conclusion of Marx. This is not what Marx argues in German Ideology. It is not sufficient to have a dictatorship of the material! Pannekoek explains “the science of the naturalist is only a part of the whole of human activity, only a means to a much greater end. It is the preceding, passive part of his activity which is followed by the active part: the technical elaboration, production and transformation of the world by man.” In fact, the social and the material are such entangled that the social design of society organizes what forms of matter come into existence via history. In falling into a purist philosophy of the mechanical origin of the spirit and the word, Lenin and his tutor Plekhanov remove the context of the event which controls how the material relates to the social and the spiritual. Gramsci repeats this problem in his concept of cultural hegemony as well as his implication of the parallelism of base and superstructure. Pannekoek doesn’t criticize Gramsci, but if he did, I am certain Pannekoek would point to how hegemony is not a descriptive concept of how historical events produce the exact way in which different economic regimes dominate culture. History and economy as processes are left out in jumping from base to superstructure. Economy is not just an engine but a way of building, a way of revealing and an uneven way. Stewart Hall used Gramsci’s binarizations to use Marxism to analyze words as containing “ideology”. But to separate ideology from economics or to create a structuralism more concerned with power and institutions than divisions of labor is to give up on Marx and to repeat Hegel/Plekhanov/Lenin/Stalin’s reassertion of a secondary birth of the social from the mechanical without mediation of history. To either separate social content from material form suggests that economy controls the social but that social does not control the economic and these binaristic separations are about being dialectical not material .
The dialectical excision of the social idea as the child of the material has birthed multiple entire fields in the humanities and social sciences which only critique language but do not consider the historical and economic rationalities in language. Discourse analysis, power relations analysis, signifier critique, all of these are ultimately postmodern nominalisms because they imply that by critiquing language we can alter objective reality. But the words are only the content payload of a newspaper, the words in a newspaper do not inherently tell you about the history of the journalism industry. To truly enter the auspice of the material world of capital, we have to go back to how the workers who make language became separate from workers that build the offices of the newspaper industry. It is too comfortable now for thinkers to proclaim themselves radical just for opposing language but refuse to explain what different form of commerce could make distinct language. Foucault’s pessimistic conclusion that all power can be resisted is an invite to symbolic negation, not to overturning the economic form. In only being able to critique ideology, we have become unable to build a different form and satisfied that if the regimes of capital just had different ideology, that its form changes. Nominalism unhooked from any collective institution of naming convention becomes mere subjectivism which is individualized. And as long as no one is concerned with doing anything but changing ideology, we are back to Hegel in his original form—the institutions can deliver enlightenment if we can make enlightened ideas win debates! But Marx was not a structural functionalist! Marx said the structure is not just a human institution but is a pattern of collective events and that pattern has to be changed materially. Ideology critique is not enough. The divisions of labor are at the core of all ideologies and until that form of divided labor can be addressed, critique becomes another genre of micro sociology! Totality is voided from Marxism when all we analyze is the twinning of being out of matter. All things including dangerous capitalist movements are a pattern that is both social and material! And if you are just changing the words, you need to be reminded by Audre Lorde that you cannot tear down the masters house with the master’s tools.