Hey good people! I randomly remembered the phrase “marxism in a defensive crouch” today which in turn reminded me of an old draft I had languishing on my hard drive so I thought I’d throw it up here. I don’t remember when I wrote it. Not recently! Been a minute since I had thoughts - I continue to be tapped out because I continue to be tapped too much, so to speak. I assume that will eventually end and I will have more time to think more on here. I apologize in advance for when that time comes! Anyhow, draft’s below. Keep on trucking!

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We: Selective Tradition, Hegemony, and Marxism in a Defensive Crouch

I feel like I've noticed something where Marxists are allowed to be in the room, so to speak, and in one respect that's laudable because intellectually lively, curious, and pluralist, but it's also constraining because one because part of the condition for being in the room is agreeing be just another presence in the room - there's a requirement to agree to disagree, kinda thing.

Part of what’s going on this, I think, is the construction of what Raymond Williams called a selective tradition, which, he stressed, is a project that occurs within and enacts some actually existing hegemony. That is, selective tradition is a process of shaping outlooks, feelings, intuitions - all the things that fall under the term ‘common sense’ - which in turn influence what people take to be obvious. (As the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser insisted, wherever there is obviousness there is ideology.) There’s nothing sinister, let alone cynical or conspiratorial in this, to be clear. But there is, I think, a politics to this. As EP Thompson, Williams’s lifelong collaborator and occasional antagonist, once put it we live in a position of values in search of a genealogy. (Thompson’s ‘we’ seems to have multiple different referents, one meaning we Marxists and revolutionary communists, another meaning all human beings insofar as people collectively tend to orient themselves in present time in relation to some imagined past - whether real or not, and another meaning all inhabitants of political outlooks.) Having different values, ‘we’ genealogize ourselves differently. ‘Different values’ is too simplistic, of course, as political differences aren’t solely about moral principles, but are also about analyses and courses of action. Better perhaps to say, ‘having different politics.’ 

Having said that I rush to add that whether a political difference is present or not is itself significantly a matter of political perspective. To put it another way, defining a ‘we’ and whether that 'we' has differences among its members that matter to the 'we' is itself a political activity or at least one informed by political outlook.

I’m aware that this can sound, I dunno, churlish on my part, like ‘are you seriously objecting to non-Marxists and Marxists being in dialog?’ a reader might scoff. My answer is, to be frank, well, yes, to some degree, depending on the requirements involved in sustaining or allowing the dialog. That is, if everything starts from and also is required to end with agreeing to disagree then at least to some degree it's not much of a dialog. This is, as usual, all very preliminary and uncertain but for whatever (little!) it's worth, it seems to me that if there is a ‘we’ gathered in a room to dialog, and
a) that ‘we’ shares a common perspective (such that there is some ‘we’ present in a meaningful sense)
b) what it holds as its common perspective is not Marxism, and
c) that ‘we’ includes some Marxists, then those Marxists are not in the room/are not members of the ‘we’ on their own terms as Marxists.

The Marxists in the room are, so to speak, in hostile territory. Politically speaking, Marxists are either in hostile territory or in Marxist territory (or both, since Marxism itself is internally contentious and not in a trivial sense but in the sense that Marxism as a tradition includes serious internal political dispute within itself). To put it another way, the welcoming of Marxists into non-Marxists spaces is simultaneously often subjectively pleasant for those of us who wear hats in addition to Marxist hats and yet a political relationship that puts Marxists on the back foot (that its subjectively pleasant is part of the problem, to some degree). This is because Marxism shouldn’t simply co-exist with other political positions. Marxism should take up the insights, if any, of competitor positions and integrate them synthetically into (rather than graft them syncretically into) Marxism, an integration which transforms those insights. And, Marxism should eventually supplant those positions, in a way that at least loosely parallels, and is at least loosely connected with, the proletarian revolution we hope for. 

Part of what I am saying is that Marxism is in important respects not a tradition that orients itself to other political traditions in a pluralist way, and insofar as we Marxists act in line with pluralism we are at worst making a mistake and at best standing in a defensive crouch that reflects a historical context far short of, and highly constraining of, our fundamental political aspirations. Part of what I am also saying is that to a significant degree, pluralism is a kind of liberalism and thus in an important respect not quite so plural as it can seem on the face of it. To be welcomed into a politically pluralist space is in a sense to be quietly told, in a way that the person doing the telling might not even realize, that one is allowed in the room if one remains on good behavior. Pluralism is, at least a lot of the time, a hegemony: pluralist spaces are hegemonized spaces. Perhaps sometimes the best we can do as Marxists is to be in those spaces, making our small contributions - pennies in a wishing well - hoping they eventually help something different happen. At the least, we should know it when this is the case. 

A while back I ranted on here about Adam Tooze and Perry Anderson and suggested (if I recall correctly - I can barely stand to write this junk, let alone read it!) that the two of them are kinds of intellectuals situated at different particular kinds of the same general sort of cultural junction point, something like this, borrowing terms from Raymond Williams: they are actors who survey emergent and residual alternative and oppositional developments and foster conversations with that material within (and, make that material legible within) various contending corners of the dominant culture. That is in part an enacting of selective tradition, an enacting essentially conducted by non-Marxists and thus, unsurprisingly, the tradition that the selecting contributes to building is not the tradition of Marxism. That we Marxists are allowed in the room or included in the larger set of intellectual and political positions can feel good - it can be lonely being a Marxist sometimes, community feels good! - but ‘that’s hegemony’ and ‘that feels good’ are compatible statements.  

As I’ve written a little about elsewhere in a pair of essays, much of what I’ve said here also applies to US labor history, though in different ways tied to differences in the cultures and disciplinary backgrounds involved. With that in mind, I’m now going to shift gears somewhat, to talk about liberal egalitarianism, an ongoing preoccupation here at Open Mode ([Sanders voice] I Am Once Again Asking For You To Read Tony Smith's Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism.)

In brief, liberal egalitarianism is the furthest left that people can be without a Marxist theory of capitalism. At the level of social theory, liberal egalitarians are in one sense the mirror opposite of Marxists, though liberal egalitarians are still generally people of conscience who want as much good as possible. That’s a good thing and yet also helps facilitate the hegemonizing of non-Marxist positions over Marxism. 

Marxists are pessimists about capitalism, believing that any capitalism will always involve forms of subordination which are intrinsically unacceptable and which produce further harms in ways that are dynamic and predictably unpredictable -  i.e., we can be sure that over time society will be afflicted with unpleasant surprises, ones that play out in ways that are retroactively unsurprising because they follow capitalism’s general and harmful social logic. (Smith’s book is very good on the harms that are baked into capitalism. I would not claim to be a scholar of Smith’s caliber, but I’ve attempted to articulate a complimentary point in my work on disability and on social murder.) 

Liberal egalitarians, on the other hand, are optimists about how good life under capitalism can get and pessimists about human capacity to do better than capitalism. In their pessimistic mode, liberal egalitarians dismiss anti-capitalist aspirations and attendant social practices as impossible and thus misguided, or as simply unnecessary. In their optimistic mode, liberal egalitarians emphasize that capitalism is not intrinsically harmful but rather only specific kinds of capitalism are. With sufficient state regulation and organization of the polity, the idea goes, capitalism can become a society that is fundamentally good, where everyone can flourish. Or at least everyone can flourish as much as is humanly possible: the optimism and the pessimism shade into each other. If we can’t do better than capitalism, then the best possible capitalism is the best we can do. 

Sometimes these differences are explicitly stated and are indicated to be clearly distinct positions. When they are, it’s harder to say ‘we’ in a way that includes both Marxists and non-Marxists. It is still possible to do so, by treating these differences as less important than something else. Sometimes that something else is a matter of practical political expediency, like the assertions that we all, regardless of the specific details of our politics, must gather together to defend liberal democracy against fascism. Practical political expediency makes sense sometimes, yet even so, it’s worth being aware of when the terms of the political unity involved do or don’t favor Marxism. Nicos Poulantzas has a line something to the effect of 'one effect of crisis can be to shore up an unsteady class hegemony' and I think this is an example of that insofar as an urgent moment is one where the tasks feel obvious and really important so that we all must get on the same page, there is no less social-political process of constructing terms of shared horizon for collaborative activity, it's just a lot of that process tends to happen implicitly and in a way that asking about what's taken as obvious is especially unwelcome. (It’s worth being aware of for Marxists specifically because often the unity proffered doesn’t tend to favor our positions; it’s also worth not being aware of for non-Marxists insofar as the terms of unity favor their positions. Generally speaking the worse one fares under any actually existing hegemony, the better off one is understanding the situation clearly, and vice versa - the better a given hegemony serves one, and the more invested one is in that hegemony, the less urgent it is to know the existing context accurately. Sometimes lack of a larger self-reflexive critical awareness is a resource facilitating action in line with and reproductive of a given hegemony. I gesture a little at this in my piece at the JHI Blog a while back via the ugly phrase "capitalism's unthought" and in my “Work of Forgetting” article in Labor.) Sometimes the unifying ‘something else’ is more anodyne and less emotionally urgent than a threat of fascism but still acts in a similar way insofar as the tasks feel obvious and it's subjectively difficult to push back - shared collegiality, intellectual curiosity (nerdiness, in a non-derogatory sense), and some limited shared interests as currently understood. At other times, the differences I’ve been claiming are present are less consciously noticed. After all, political outlooks can be held without being explicitly or self-reflexively held, at least to some extent. That sounds like a limitation of such positions, in intellectual terms, but it is often a political strength, because an implicitly held position is one that the holder finds intuitively obvious, perhaps without even realizing they do so. Positions held in this way are harder to contest, let alone refute – this too is part of hegemony.

Something I've noticed, again only vaguely and out of the corner of my eye and in a way that outstrips my training (I continue to regret not taking any English classes after high school!!), specifically noticed as someone who tries to write academic history and also Marxist theory (neither fish nor fowl, kinda thing), is that implicitly held positions are often tied in complicated ways to stylistic conventions and to preferences regarding degree of analytical abstraction. As the old cliche goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Conversely, a good way to make sure everything continues to look like nail to someone is to make sure they don’t acquire any tools other than a hammer. Nonmetaphorically: sometimes the shared practices and objects that help define fields as fields and kinds of writing as kinds of writing do political work, unintentionally and all the more powerfully for it. Or rather, part of how fields quietly shape their members politically is via defining the terms of what counts as the work of the field.

The degree to which a collectivity has a shared political outlook that is left implicit is the degree to which that collectivity can largely ignore internal disagreements as being minor details, with some of the constraints quietly offloaded to what seem like apolitical matters of what defines the field as a field or what makes work recognizable as being in or of the field. In my view this is a significant part of how Marxist academics in less theory-heavy fields like US history are hegemonized - we can (personally, I often do) show up in the activities of those fields wearing our disciplinary hat as much or more than our Marxist hat, and don’t always notice that the conventions and culture of the field have a politics such that we are operating on a terrain that is not ours and which thus constrains us into some positions - a defensive crouch, as I said - instead of other positions.

Part of that defensive crouch as it manifests in the fields I’m more familiar with - labor history and different flavors of left legal scholarship - involves what I would call a possibilist orientation toward activity within official institutions. The institutions I have in mind relative to these two fields are, respectively, the institutions of the official labor movement and the state agencies that interface with it, like the National Labor Relations Board in the US, and the various institutions of the law and legal academy. By possibilist I mean that these fields involve a commitment to seeing as much good as possible done via the activities of progressive professionals acting as representatives of other people - good lawyering, good professoring, good leading of the union and NGO, and, very often, good statecraft by progressive politicians. At a gut level I think this is also strongly related to what I think of as the soft left, a political vision of working through the existing institutions of capitalist society in basically institutionally normal ways, maybe supplemented occasionally by other forms of activism, and getting to a much better social condition as a result. I'm very sympathetic to that impulse, not least because it's rooted in large part in a sincere desire for ordinary people to have better lives, and I think it's just a mistaken impulse. Anyhow.

Possibilism and liberal egalitarianism relate in an important way. If one is, as a good liberal egalitarian, optimistic about how good we can make capitalist society, and pessimistic about the possibility of getting outside of capitalist society, then acting for the greater good in these institutional frameworks comes fairly strongly recommended. If one holds to a perspective oriented toward social revolution, however, and has a critical understanding of the role of law and the state within capitalist society, the kinds of good that can come from acting within the relatively respectable official institutions look smaller - still good, but leaving many morally urgent social ills and their causes unaddressed. Furthermore, addressing those ills and their causes requires activity that is at best discouraged by officially respectable institutions. (I discuss this a little more in relation to US labor law in an essay here: https://organizing.work/2023/08/the-national-labor-relations-act-is-anti-strike-legislation/)  

As I said, it may well be that in some settings the best we Marxists can do in the immediate present and short term future is to carry ourselves in a defensive crouch in settings hostile to us. If so, we should at the least know that this is what we are doing. Furthermore, in doing so, we should have our guard up a little, so that the hegemonized spaces we inhabit don’t do as much to shape our politics and our outlook. And in doing that we should aspire, and attempt to plan in a serious way, for our activities to eventually move out of a defensive crouch and to bring on such a crouch in our opponents who occupy competitor political positions. This will be personally uncomfortable sometimes, because some of those opponents don’t always feel like opponents, and because we are empathetic people and so are some of our competitors, some of whom are also quite friendly and charming - not to mention the ways all of this can have ramifications on our employment. This too is all part of hegemony sometimes. If (no, wait! when! When!!! [shakes fist]) Marxism breaks out of hostile spaces and surpasses its defensive crouch, then the referent to ‘we’ will change, as will who says it. At that point, there will be fewer ‘we’s that include Marxists and non-Marxists, and a greater proliferation of Us’s and Them’s. 

To be clear, I don’t mean to say that subjective line drawing such as going ‘I’m not in that club!’ and so on contributes to creating the condition I’ve called Marxism leaving its defensive crouch. (While I do think the end of Marxism’s defensiveness can partially be willed into existence in voluntarist fashion, it can only partially be so willed, and the deliberate giving of offense is not a contribution to doing so - polemic can be rewarding but it’s often a consolation prize.) Rather my point here is in part that when the political terrain shifts for the better in a larger sense, that shift will at least to some degree be experienced as uncomfortable for those of us Marxists who are sometimes invited into rooms with non-Marxists. There will be some related discomfort in that there are some Marxists invited into those rooms more than others - I'm thinking here of what I said about Perry Anderson sitting at certain junction points. I'm an admirer of Anderson's to a significant degree and yet I also think that John L. Lewis's old remark defending his hiring of communist staff applies: 'who gets the bird, the hunter or the dog?' A well fed bird dog on a long leash is still not the hunter, and if Marxism is going to slip the leash of pluralism (to swap the metaphor from defensive crouch) there will be some disputes among some of us dogs. And as I said while it can be subjectively pleasant when Marxists are politely welcomed into rooms and included as ‘we’ in selective traditions constructed by liberal egalitarians, it's worth asking what they get from having us in the room, paying attention to the constraints that come with being in the room, remembering that our capacity to be in the room is itself the product of a condition that desperately needs surpassing as soon as possible, and remembering that some of our aspirations include events taking place which will make us no longer welcome in the room. (Toni Gilpin made an analogous point a while back in this interview - https://fightbacknews.org/articles/interview-toni-gilpin-recent-strikes-and-need-fighting-unions - noting that sympathetic coverage of workers and unions in institutions like the New York Times is a product of labor being weak and conciliatory, and that a labor movement that is succeeding according to our terms is one that will absolutely not get favorable news coverage, far from it.)