Abstract
The revival of interest in Marxist theory within the United States and Great Britain over the past fifteen years has resulted in the development of Marxist scholarship in virtually every area of the humanities and social sciences. These contributions have been thrust to the center of academic debates on a wide range of issues so that it is no longer possible, even in relatively conservative U.S. universities, to ignore or disparage Marxism as a way of coming to grips with the social world. At the same time, the reawakening of Marxist theory and research has produced anew a series of debates regarding its fundamental tenets, particularly in political economy, the theory of culture and ideology, and historical questions. These debates were particularly vigorous during the 1970’s when, in all advanced capitalist countries, the promise for revolutionary action of the previous decade abated. Under these circumstances, it was not surprising that left intellectuals would open the discussion of precisely those issues raised by Marxist theory during the interwar period discussed above.
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Notes
Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London: New Left Books, 1979), p. 79.
Kostas Axelos, Alienation and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976). This is an important Heideggerian reading of the early writings of Marx that has received too little attention in the Anglo-American Marxist debate precisely because of its philosophical orientation.
Serge Moscovici, Society Against Nature (London: Harvester Press, 1976), pp. 27–30. Habermas relies on this text for the empirical argument that interaction rather than labor distinguishes humans from animals.
Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1970). Thus the social formation is no longer, in this conception, viewed as a category of labor, but becomes a system of systems that includes not only our relation to nature and the relations of production but also the entire set of relations that are grouped under the rubric of “superstructure.” I would claim that the specificity of the determining instance of the economic infrastructure is lost in the concept of social formation as a totality of relatively autonomous sub-systems.
See Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter 7; also S. Freud, “The Unconscious,” (1915)
Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory, Phillip Rieff, ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1963). Lacan showed that Freud held the unconscious intelligible by means of decoding: “the unconscious is structured like a language,” and that the task of psychoanalysis is to break the code by which it hides itself from understanding through a reading of symptoms as signs of real relations. However, Freud always insisted that to bring the speech of the unconscious to the surface was not the same as controlling it. In principle, conscious life can never subsume the unconscious under its processes.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961).
William Leiss, The Limits to Satisfaction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), p. 113–14.
Andre Gorz, Strategy for Labor (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).
Serge Mallet, The New Working Class (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1975).
Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: New Left Books, 1975).
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 169.
Larry Laudan, Progress and its Problems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
Shulamith Firestone, Dialectic of Sex (New York: Vintage, 1968).
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).
Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man. This view contrasted sharply with his earlier position in Eros and Civilization (1955), that erotic activity was subversive to the prevailing social order since the order rested, in a large measure, on the repression of the pleasure principle. In the early 1960’ Marcuse concluded that pleasure could be used by consumer society to insure its own reproduction.
For a fuller discussion of the relation between desiring production and commodity production see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (New York: Viking Press, 1977). The authors try to solve the antinomy between production and culture by positing their mutual relation and antagonism. At the same time they deny the privileged place of one over the other by transcoding sexuality into the Marxist categories of labor. The starting effect of this move is to remove desire from its marginal place in both Marxist and liberal discourse, placing it on equal footing with labor.
Whence Christopher Lasch’s critique of narcissism, in which the heresy of self-love is regarded as socially disintegrative. See Christopher Lasch, Culture of Narcissism (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).
Luce Irigary, “That Sex which is not One,” in Language, Sexuality and Subversion, ed. Paul Foss and Meagan Morris (Darlington: Feral Publications, 1978).
Alexandra Kollantai, Writings (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1976).
Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor (London: Macmillan, 1978).
Alvin Gouldner, Dialectic of Technology and Ideology (New York: Seabury Press, 1976).
Jean Baudrillard, Mirror of Production (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975). But Baudrillard has failed to grasp the way in which Marx and Marxism have insisted upon the concept of mode of production in pre-capitalist societies. For Marx, it was a question of grasping the past as totality and developing a theory of historical periodicity. Historical materialism is a way of making social relations intelligible without resorting to the older notions of world spirit. That is, Marx insisted that history was a process of interaction between conscious and unconscious elements and was grounded in human action without which the reproduction of real life was not possible. To date, no metatheory has succeeded as well as Marxism in grasping human history as a process of constant change. Its value is to have provided a rational explanation of historical development. The real objection, then, is not the way in which Marxism’s rationality proceeds, as Baudrillard claims. The problem is the constitution of “the rational” in Western theory as such.
Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
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© 1990 Stanley Aronowitz
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Aronowitz, S. (1990). Nature and Human Nature in Marxist Theory. In: The Crisis in Historical Materialism. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20696-4_4
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