#werner bonefeld

[rosswolfe]

Alan Milchman (1940-2021)

. Was sad to learn that Alan Milchman, better known in ultraleft circles as Mac Intosh of Internationalist Perspective, passed away on Friday (I was told by someone close to him that it was okay to publicly share his name). I don’t know enough details about his life to really write a proper obituary. But I’m told that IP plans to release a statement about his passing, so I will be sure to link to…

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[perkwunos]

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; 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.

Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn, Kosmas Psychopedis, Introduction to Open Marxism, Vol. 1

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When posited as natural, the economy of labour appears as a force of nature, legitimizing existing social relations as developed nature and delineating possible futures as idealized derivatives of the existent. Both depend on the deadly notion that ‘freedom is recognition of necessity’. Yet, nature has nothing to do with it.

The idea that society is in the last instance determined by historically active, general, economic laws is in its entirety tied to existing conditions. Historical materialism conceived dogmatically as a science of some general economic laws reflects existing society under the spell of identification, which includes the allegedly realistic thesis that the capitalist social relations embody the logic of an abstract market structure whose empirical reality is mediated by class struggle. Instead of the critical notion that ‘concepts are moments of the reality that requires their formation’, this idea holds that concepts are generally applicable scientific instruments, which are capable of dissecting and analysing every society at all times and places as an overdetermined manifestation of abstract economic laws.

Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason

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Theoretical mysteries find their rational explanation in the comprehension of the historically specific character of human social practice, however perverted this practice might be in the form of relationships between economic things. That is, ‘definite social relations between men themselves assume . . . the fantastic form of a relation between things’ that assert themselves as real economic abstractions, upon which movement the life of the social individuals depends in its entirety. Yet, their genesis is founded on the ‘peculiar social character of the labour that produces them’. The ‘new reading’ focuses on the exchange validity of value without examining the peculiar social character of labour, leading to a conception of the value form as some abstractly valid self-moving essence of wealth, an ‘universal in re’ that posits its own expansion. However, the exposition of the capitalist categories falls short if it proceeds as a merely logical derivation of economic forms. These forms are the forms of definite social relations, which are historically branded and antagonistic from the outset. In distinction to the new reading, the social antagonism does not derive from the economic categories as the real-life expression of their contested movements. Rather, and as I set out to argue, the class antagonism is the constitutive premise of the economic categories.

Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason

[zaschiabouzarri]

The Class-for-its… -Negation

‘…the existence of class relations does NOT call for a Marxist class theory, nor does it call for an argument from the standpoint of the working class. It calls for a critique of class society and for a critique of the capitalistically organized form of labour. Class is a negative term. It belong to the wrong society. The resolution to class society is the classless society.’ (George Souvlis, "Ordoliberalism and the Death of Liberal Democracy – An Interview With Werner Bonefeld", http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/ordoliberalism-and-the-death-of-liberal-democracy-an-interview-with-werner-bonefeld/)

‘The truth about class is, therefore, that the proletariat had, historically, two contradictory objectives: one, to preserve itself as an estate with its own institutions (trade unions, working-class parties, a socialist press, instruments of self-help, etc.), and another one, to defeat its antagonist and to abolish itself as a class. We can now see that the abolition of the working class as an ‘estate’, as a ‘guild’, has been effected by capitalism; capitalism has finally transformed the proletariat (and the bourgeoisie) into a veritable class, putting an end to their capacity for hegemony. Class hegemony of any kind (still quite viva­cious and vigorous in Gramsci’s time) was exactly what was annihilated. Class as an economic reality exists, and it is as fundamental as ever, although it is culturally and politically almost extinct. This is a triumph of capitalism.

[…] What is certain is that the last flowers have fallen off the chains. The working-class culture which inspired so much heroism and self-abnegation is dead. That culture was modernist in the sense of taking aim at hierarchy and trying to achieve a secular, egalitarian and rights-based society. This the working class mistook for socialism. It is not. It is capitalism. Capitalism could be itself only if and when aided by socialist delusion. We are now free of this delusion. We see the task more clearly.’ (Gáspár Miklós Tamás, “Telling the truth about class”, Grundrisse no. 22, http://www.grundrisse.net/grundrisse22/tellingTheTruthAboutClass.htm)

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GS: You were one of the editors of the Open Marxist books. Could we say that the project for these books was an effort to save the Hegelian dialectic within the Marxist tradition from the Althusserian structuralist paradigm? To which extent do you believe that this tradition of Open Marxism is still relevant in the light of new studies (like this of Warren Montag) that present Althusser’s Marxism as a Marxism of the conjuncture? WB: For me the title of the book, Open Marxism, was in homage to my teacher Johannes Agnoli who had published a book under the same title. It was in large part a discussion between Mandel and himself. Mandel’s economistic account was anything but ‘open’. The book included also a long postscript by Agnoli about the purposes of critical thought. I summarized this postscript in my first publication, ‘Open Marxism’, which was published in the first issue the Journal Common Sense, which at that time was co-edited by Richard Gunn and I. This little paper was really just an attempt on my part to understand Agnoli, transcribing what I had read what I thought I had learned into my own words. For some of us the open Marxism volumes, there are three altogether, were an attempt to save the Hegelian dialectic within the Marxist tradition from the Althusserian structuralist paradigm, as you put it. It was not really an attempt at autonomism, although it might have seemed like that. It was an attempt to stop thinking with preformed theoretical instruments about society, applying preformed ideas to social situations and institutions. Instead it was an attempt at thinking in and through society, connecting thought with experience. Althusser is a great traditional theorist. For a critical theory of society, it is important to think against the grain of society so as to understand it better. Open Marxism either thinks against the grain or it is not open to the constitutive turmoil of bourgeois society. To put this differently, the existence of class relations does NOT call for a Marxist class theory, nor does it call for an argument from the standpoint of the working class. It calls for a critique of class society and for a critique of the capitalistically organized form of labour. Class is a negative term. It belong to the wrong society. The resolution to class society is the classless society. The Open Marxism volumes were attempts at freeing Marx from traditional theory, at reconnecting with critical Marxist currents and renewing Marxism as a negative critique of society. GS: One year ago before the publication of Open Marxism you edited the book along with John Holloway, Post-Fordism and Social Form: Α Marxist debate on the Post-Fordist state. In the introduction of the book you make an explicit critique of Marxist theories that conceive of the state and capital not as a terrain of class struggle but as structures. Can you talk a bit more about your criticisms of the concept of “Post-Fordism”? To what extent do you believe that these criticisms are relevant considering the the gradual “hollowing out” of the state? WB: The terms fordism and post-fordism were part of the academic Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist had moved on from the terms affluent society and corporatism. After post-fordism it moved on to globalization, then neoliberalism, and now I hear post-neoliberalism and/or ordoliberalism is the phrase of the time. Zeitgeist thinking is commercialized scholarship. The job of the scholar is to reveal the hidden truth of the constituted social relations. The post-fordist analysis picked up on certain elements of reality and combined them into a theoretical model and it then proceeded to assess the distance between reality and this theoretical model. The analysis identified the social conflicts as means of transition from the fordist model to the post-fordist model. The social relations appeared thus as the agents of definite structural transformations – from this model of society to that model of society. The contemporary modeling of the social relations as post-neoliberal or ordoliberal works within the same analytical frame.