The American Worker and the Absurd Truth about Marxism

435 Pages·2010·3.34 MB·English

Alan Johnson
Editorial Introduction:The American Worker
and the Absurd Truth about Marxism
Joking . . .
In 1925 or 1926, the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács
responded to an intellectual police action on the part
of Lazslo Rudas, his former collaborator. Rudas had
attacked Lukács’s heretical book History and Class
Consciousness as subjectivist, reminding Lukács that
history itself – in the shape of the development of
industry, exploitation and class con(cid:143)ict – would take
care of class consciousness. Rudas argued that ‘if
proletarians do not feel more or less “class conscious”
or even feel hostile to the class, then that is because
their position in the economic process is itself not
purely typical. Either they are not working in large
factories, or they belong to the petty-bourgeois
proletariat’. Yes, Rudas must be correct, joked Lukács,
appearing to give way, ‘for, as we know, the technical
backwardness of the American organisation of the
economy is the decisive reason for their undeveloped
class consciousness’. Having made his joke, Lukács
then occupied the theoretical space it created. ‘But,
jokes aside’, he continued, Rudas’s view ‘conceives
class consciousness as a mechanical product of the
Historical Materialism, volume 11:4 (5–13)
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2003
Also available online – www.brill.nl
6 (cid:149) Alan Johnson
immediate economic position of the workers [and] does not consider social
relations in their totality’.1
Lukács was not the (cid:142)rst or the last Marxist who, faced with the absurd
efforts of determinist Marxism – Rudas’s ‘economistic austerity’ – to grasp
the USA, has resorted to the use of comedy as a pedagogic tool. In 1851,
Engels, writing to Joseph Weydemeyer, quipped of the American workers
‘bourgeois conditions look like a beau ideal to them’.2In 1906, Werner Sombart
famously remarked that the ship of American socialism had crashed on the
‘reefs of roast beef and apple pie’. And, in 1985, Irving Howe, when an ex-
Marxist for sure, concluded his essay ‘Why Has Socialism Failed in America?’
in a Jewish vein of humour: ‘Henry James once said that being an American
is a complex fate. We American socialists could add: he didn’t know the half
of it’.3
These jokes, funnily enough, tell us much about the enduring interest of
the best Marxist theory and historiography in the United States of America.
In registering the gap between Marxist expectation and American reality,
they keep the gap openfor Marxismand keep Marxism alive to the gap. The jokes,
in other words, help hold open the theoretical space for a ‘joking aside’, in
which Marxism is freed up to think American complexity and stay within
touching distance of American celerity.
A serious point was made by Gaston Bachelard, who was not only a
philosopher of science but also of the poetic imagination and, (cid:143)eetingly, of
the links between the two. John Lechte has observed that Bachelard saw the
danger that ‘thought and its concepts would...wither – sick from its very
completeness and simplicity’.4 The imagination – and the comedic is a form
of the imagination – can help ward off theoretical sterility.
‘Comedy uncovers the absurd truth which is why people are so afraid of
being laughed at in real life’ said John Carey in his book on Dickens, The
Violent Ef(cid:142)gy.5 Lukács’s little joke exposed the absurd truth about the
economistic austerity that had sterilised Marxist theory. His joke frightened
1 Lukács 2000, p. 68, pp. 69–70.
2 Engels [1851] quoted in Howe 1985, p. 105.
3 Howe 1985. For an earlier essay on the fate of American socialism, written while
still a member of the US Marxist organisation, the Independent Socialist League, see
Howe 1952.
4 Lechte 1994, p. 6.
5 Quoted in Phillips 2002, p. 37.
The American Worker & the Truth about Marxism (cid:149) 7
the Comintern hierarchy.6 The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips reminds us
that such absurd truths usually concern usand the way ‘we are always other
than what we want to be’ and ‘don’t look the same as we look to ourselves’.
Mockery, he observes, works on this painful gap. ‘Something about a person
has to be exposed, usually something they would prefer to conceal from
themselves’.7Lukács’s use of what the Italian Marxist Sebastiano Timpanaro
called the ‘feigned slip’8 exposed the absurd truth that Rudas’s Marxism
would ‘always be other than what it wants to be’ (a good enough guide to
political practice). Next to the political complexity of the USA, the blunt
theoretical tools of ‘economistic austerity’ are indeed absurd.
Freud knew the pedagogic value of a good joke. Mannoni reminds us that,
for Freud, wit represented simultaneously, ‘a return to the power and freedom
children have...to play’ and an educational tool. Indeed, it is the very child-
like play of wit that ‘sometimes serves to get across a too daring idea’ as it
‘captures our attention on one point to make us more perceptive on another’.
Wit, it seems, is the wrapping we adults require, the display of technique we
need, in order to accept the old pleasures of childish origin. The joke disinhibits.9
Certainly, when Lukács cracked his joke, Marxism was freighted down by
mechanism, economism, and teleology, and was in need of a good laugh at
itself. Lukács took that which was taboo in Second-International Marxism
(and which, as John Rees has pointed out, was still taboo in much of the
Third International)10and – whether we judge the attempt ultimately successful
or not – sought to make of it the starting point of a Marxism able to come to
terms with complexity. His joke was aimed at a Marxism ‘sick from its very
completeness and simplicity’.11
6 For Zinoviev’s thuggish response to Lukács’s book see Rees 2000, pp. 17–25.
7 Phillips 2002, p. 37.
8 Timpanaro 1974, pp. 127–8. Timpanaro distinguishes the feigned slip from the
Freudian slip by its knowingness and intentionality. He offers a telling example from
Cicero in which the Senator uses the feigned slip in debate to allude to an absurd
truth about Clodius and his sister.
9 Mannoni 1985, pp. 99, 102.
10 Rees 2000, p. 19.
11 Under Stalinism – an entire social system ‘sick from its completeness and
simplicity’– the joke wasthe joking aside. For a particularly (cid:142)ne example, see i ek
2002, p. 1.
8 (cid:149) Alan Johnson
. . . and joking aside
The enigma of the USA has long thrust Marxists headlong into the manifold
complexity of ‘social relations in their totality’. For sure, one can (cid:142)nd in Engels
the hope that history will take care of class consciousness (‘there cannot be
any doubt that the ultimate platform of the American working class must
and will be essentially the same as that now adopted by the whole militant
working class of Europe’).12But the real value in Engels’s letters to Americans
are precisely his doubts not his certainties, his discussion of the wanton and
aberrant and not the guaranteed. He is, in many ways, the (cid:142)rst ‘exceptionalist’.
In a letter to Friedrich A. Sorge of 2 December 1893, Engels acknowledged
that ‘it is not to be denied that American conditions involve very great and
particular dif(cid:142)culties for the steady development of a workers’ party’.13 He
enumerated three basic ‘American conditions’, the juridico-political, the socio-
cultural and the economic.
First, the Constitution, based as it is in England upon party government,
which causes every vote for any candidate not put up by one of the two
governing parties to be lost. And the American, like the Englishman, wants
to in(cid:143)uence his state; he does not throw his vote away.
Then, and more especially, immigration, which divides the workers into
two groups: the native-born and the foreigners, and the latter in turn into
(1) the Irish (2) the Germans, (3) the many small groups, each of which
understands only itself: Czechs, Poles, Italians, Scandinavians etc. And then
the Negroes. To form a single party out of these requires unusually powerful
incentives. Often there is a sudden violent élan but the bourgeois need only
wait passively and the dissimilar elements of the working class fall apart
again.
Third, through the protective tariff system and the steadily growing
domestic market the workers must have been exposed to a prosperity no
trace of which has been seen here in Europe for years now...14
12 Engels, 1887 Preface to the American edition of The Condition of the Working Class
in England, quoted in Howe 1985, p. 107. Writing eighty-two years after Engels, in
1969, Lucio Colletti wrote ‘Think of the American working class. It is only a cog of
capital, a part of the capitalist mechanism’. Unable to bear this thought, Colletti quickly
added ‘though every working class has passed through this stage’ (1972, p. 235).
13 Engels 1990, p. 75.
14 Engels 1990, pp. 75–6.
The American Worker & the Truth about Marxism (cid:149) 9
Engels often identi(cid:142)ed two further conditions acting against the formation
of a workers party. The ‘ease with which the surplus population is drained
off to the farms’,15and the sectarianism of doctrinaire ‘Marxist’ organisations,
often staffed by German immigrants (although history was to show native-
born Marxists were often no better). The sectarian Marxist, complained Engels,
ignores ‘the necessity of learning the language of the country or of getting
to know American conditions properly’.16
Although the landscape has been transformed in the intervening period,
the translations, essays and reviews collected in this volume of Historical
Materialismface similar limiting horizons. While the differences are marked,
the continuity with Engels’s efforts to grapple with the ‘very great and
particular dif(cid:142)culties’ posed by ‘American conditions’ is palpable.
The collection
The volume opens with the (cid:142)rst English translation of Karl Kautsky’s 1906
long essay ‘The American Worker’, an extended response published in Die
Neue Zeitto Werner Sombart’s 1905 essay ‘Why Is There No Socialism in the
United States?’ A scrupulous intellectual history of Kautsky’s essay provided
by Daniel Gaido highlights the impact of the 1905 Russian Revolution upon
Kautsky’s political thought. Paul Le Blanc then considers Kautsky’s article
as part of his critical survey of successive Marxist attempts to come to terms
with the USA.
Other essays and reviews each treat the various ‘American conditions’
identi(cid:142)ed by Engels. Each is marked by an effort to come to terms with the
fact that Engels’s optimism – found also in Sombart and Kautsky – that
History would take care of class consciousness in the USA, has been proven
misplaced. In truth, much that was then seen as ‘American’ and ‘exceptional’
is now ‘normal’, from political systems without workers’ parties to the ubiquity
of mass consumerism, from the pathologies of possessive individualism to
the articulation of politics by cross-class social movements. In some regards
at least, it seems that the USA was showing the world the face of its own
15 Engels [1851] quoted in Howe 1985, p. 105. For Irving Howe’s argument that a
uniquely American ideology, rooted in the open frontier but now with life of its own,
which he terms Emersonianism, remains the most important ‘exceptional’ condition
for socialists to come to terms with see Howe 1985 and 1986.
16 Engels 1990, p. 75.
10 (cid:149) Alan Johnson
future and American radicalism, it turns out, ‘has long faced the future that
lay beyond’ the nineteenth-century European experience.17
The (cid:142)rst condition identi(cid:142)ed by Engels, the political and constitutional
obstacles to the emergence of a labour party, is treated indirectly by several
of the essays. In Loren Goldner’s bold and sweeping reinterpretation of US
history, the unparalleled political hegemony of the American bourgeoisie is
understood as the outcome of a quite exceptional historical experience in
which the extensive phase of capital accumulation took place without an
absolutist state and the institutional arrangements for the intensive phase of
capital accumulation were put in place without the participation of a working-
class political party in the state. This periodisation of the development of US
capitalist development is then used to explain the political and ideological
containment of the US working class, in particular to account for the great
missed opportunity of the 1930s, when deep capitalist crisis and the explosive
rise of the industrial trade unions failed to give birth to a workers’ party.
Engels’s awareness of the impact of immigration and the racial and ethnic
division of the working class has remained central to Marxist attempts to
understand the USA. Although Paul Buhle has noted that ‘Marxist doctrine
in its internationalist abstraction has run up against a vast tide of complex
group loyalties and vernaculars’18 many twentieth-century Marxists, from
W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James to Max Shachtman and Theodore Allen
have laboured hard to make sense of this ‘vast tide’ and, in particular, to
elaborate the full theoretical and political implications of Engels worryingly
bald sentence, ‘And then the Negroes’.19 The ethno-religious polarisation of
the working class is examined here in Noel Ignatiev’s critique of ‘whiteness’
studies and in Bryan Palmer’s sparkling review essay of Martin Scorsese’s
(cid:142)lm about the feuding immigrant and native Gangs of New York.
The contemporary meaning of the third ‘American condition’ identi(cid:142)ed by
Engels is explored in Resnick and Wolff’s exciting research into the exceptional
combination of rising consumption and increasing exploitation experienced
by the US working class. Peter Hudis explores the relation between worker
and intellectual in the age of automation, highlighting the sustained militancy
17 Buhle 1987, p. 12.
18 Buhle 1987, p. 13.
19 See, for example, Du Bois 1990, James 1993, Allen 1994 and 1997, and Shachtman
2003.
The American Worker & the Truth about Marxism (cid:149) 11
and social consciousness of the US proletariat which, he suggests, has been
underestimated due to the singular concern for a missing labour party.
Engels laboured long to combat, both in the USA and in Great Britain, the
terrible in(cid:143)uence of doctrinaire and sectarian forms of Marxism. In this volume,
Alan Johnson draws upon Étienne Balibar’s concept of égalibertéto sketch the
outline of an equalibertarian Marxism that might help put some substance
back into the revolutionary project here in the West. Marcus Rediker’s and
Peter Linebaugh’s marvellous recent history of the radical Atlantic, reviewed
here by Bryan Palmer, might be read as an extended con(cid:142)rmation of Balibar’s
claim that the overarching political and historical fact established by the
democratic revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – a fact
which forms the political horizon of an equalibertarian Marxism – is that
equality and liberty ‘depend upon one another in practice’ and can only be
realised ‘from below’. The 1930s writings of Sidney Hook, which remain one
peak of achievement in US Marxist theory, also saw Marxism as the inheritor
of the promise of the bourgeois revolutions. His best book Towards the
Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation (1933) is discussed
in this volume by his intellectual biographer Christopher Phelps.20The exchange
between Sharon Smith and Nelson Lichtenstein, prompted by Lichtenstein’s
acclaimed history of US labour in the twentieth century, State of the Union,
ranges over many issues but its political centre of gravity is the relation of
labour’s missing party to the record of the Communist Party (USA) and the
Democratic Party, while the central event in dispute is, again, the missed
opportunity of the 1930s.21 And translations of two short pieces by Franz
Mehring cast a sideways light on the dif(cid:142)culty of implanting Marxism ‘on
native ground’.
Penetrating reviews by Moody, McQuire and Friedman subject the
‘exceptionalist’ thesis to searching critique while Wald, Lieberman and Barn(cid:142)eld
explore episodes in oppositional cultural practice.
The editors do not claim that this collection is comprehensive. We regret
the absence of articles from Marxist feminists in particular and plan to address
this lacuna, and to carry further discussion of the contemporary American
20 Hook 1933 acknowledged an af(cid:142)nity to Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness
which he read in German (see p. 9). However Hook observed that Lukács ‘links Marx
up – unfortunately much too closely – with the stream of German classical philosophy’
and insisted that there was ‘nothing a priori in Marx’s philosophy; it is naturalistic,
historical and empirical throughout’ (p. 17).
21 Lichtenstein 2002.
12 (cid:149) Alan Johnson
worker and the dynamics of race and racism in the USA, in future volumes
of Historical Materialism (and, of course, we are open to any proposals you
the reader may have for us). The task could not be more urgent. If the duel
between the US hyperpower and the fundamentalists is not to set the terms
of world politics then much rests with the American proletariat, the most
powerful and largest in the world. Ernest Mandel correctly identi(cid:142)ed ‘a
destruction of the socialist tradition in the American working class’.22 How
can this catastrophe be reversed? How can the American working class begin
to make itself as an independent political force? How should the terrain of
politics in the USA – from a shifting social structure to new patterns of
consumption, exploitation, and identity, and from cultural bifurcation to the
crack-up of the two-party system – be mapped? And how acted upon? What
resources have historical-materialist theory and historiography to bring to
these questions?
References
Allen, Theodore W. 1994, The Invention of the White Race, Volume I: Racial Oppression
and Social Control, London: Verso.
Allen, Theodore W. 1997, The Invention of the White Race, Volume II: The Origin of Racial
Oppression in Anglo-America, London: Verso.
Buhle, Paul 1987, Marxism in the United States, London: Verso.
Colletti, Lucio 1972, From Rousseau to Lenin. Studies in Ideology and Society, London:
New Left Books.
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1990 [1935], Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880, New York:
Free Press
Engels, Friedrich 1990 [1893], ‘Letter to Friedrich A. Sorge’, 2 December 1893, in German
Essays on Socialism in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Frank Mecklenburg and
Manfred Stassen, New York: Continuum.
Hook, Sidney 1933, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation,
London: Victor Gollancz.
Howe, Irving 1952, ‘An Answer to Critics of American Socialism; An Analysis of Their
Method and Politics’, The New International, VXII, 3: 115–52.
Howe, Irving 1985, Socialism and America, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Howe, Irving 1986, The American Newness. Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson,
Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
James, C.L.R. 1993, American Civilisation, Oxford: Blackwell.
22 Mandel 1979, p. 202.
The American Worker & the Truth about Marxism (cid:149) 13
Lechte, John 1994, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers from Structuralism to Postmodernity,
London: Routledge.
Lichtenstein, Nelson 2002, State of the Union. A Century of American Labor, Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Lukács, Georg 2000, Tailism and the Dialectic: A Defence of ‘History and Class Consciousness’,
London: Verso.
Mandel, Ernest 1979, Revolutionary Marxism Today, London: New Left Books.
Phillips, Adam 2002, Equals, London: Faber and Faber.
Rees, John 2000, ‘Introduction’, in Lukács 2000.
Shachtman, Max 2003, Race and Revolution, London: Verso
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i ek, Slavoj 2002, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London: Verso.
Karl Kautsky
The American Worker
I. Two models for the development of
Germany
In his ‘Studies in the Historical Development of the
North American Proletariat’, which Sombart published
in the Archive for the Social Sciences (Vol. XXI, Nos.
1–3),1 he remarks:
The United States is the country with the most
advanced capitalist development, so that its
economic structure represents our future. What
Marx correctly stated about England in 1867, we
may now apply to America: De te fabula narratur,
Europa [About you, Europe, is the story being
told], when we are reporting about conditions in
America, at least as far as capitalist development
is concerned.2
This assertion can be accepted only with great
reservations. A country which, like England in the
sixties [of the nineteenth century], could serve in
every respect as a classical model of capitalist society
and all its tendencies – such a country does not exist
1 [Editorial note: Sombart (cid:142)rst published his series of articles under the title ‘Studien
zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des nordamerikanischen Proletariats’ in the Archivs fur
Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Band XXI, Heft 1–3. In 1906, he republished them
in book form under the title Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus?
All quotations are taken from the English translation: Sombart 1976.]
2 Sombart 1976, p. 23.
Historical Materialism, volume 11:4 (15–77)
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2003
Also available online – www.brill.nl