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RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 20 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2008)
Susan Jahoda, Krasnoyarsk, 2007. Printed courtesy of the artist.
The Theory of Marxism: Questions and
Answers
Vladislav Sofronov, Fredric Jameson,
5 Jack Amariglio and Yahya M. Madra
Vladislav Sofronov questioned a number of prominent Marxist scholars on the
challenges to contemporary Marxism posed by volatile post-Soviet conditions. He
seeks a way forward: away from neoliberalism, and toward a leftist consciousness
that can be articulated across borders. This article publishes the responses of
10 Frederic Jameson and of Jack Amariglio and Yahya M. Madra. Jameson’s answers
reflect his attitude toward contemporary Marxism: its dialectic, the relationship
between labor and the theoretical problems of the present. He outlines the
challenges that affect Marxism, particularly the disparity between labor and
technology and the pressure from postmodernity and culture. Amariglio and Madra
15 stress the enduring significance of the Marxist dialectic, and give a descriptive
analysis of the alternation of notions between labor and capital.
Key Words: Contemporary Marxism, Marxist Scholars, Dialectic, Labor
Vladislav Sofronov: Which aspects of Marxism’s theoretical legacy definitively belong
to the past? Which aspects still seem urgent today?
ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/08/030368-18
– 2008 Association for Economic and Social Analysis
DOI: 10.1080/08935690802133943
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RUSSIAN AESTHETICS UNDER CAPITALISM 369
20 Fredric Jameson: I don’t think of it like that, in terms of what’s living and what’s
dead in Marxism, as Croce said. It seems to me that Marxism is reinterpreted at each
moment of capitalism, and I believe that we’re now in a third moment of capitalism,
after Lenin’s moment and after the original one, in which Marxism is reinterpreted on
a much larger scale than it was in the Leninist period. I do not understand Marxism as
25 Marxism-Leninism. I understand Marxism as the analysis of capitalism, and I’m always
amused when people say that capitalism has triumphed and Marxism is dead, because
Marxism is the analysis of capitalism. The Marxist economists today are the only ones
who are looking at the system as a whole. If you look at bourgeois economists, they’re
interested in specific local problems of capitalism*/inflation, investment, and so
30 forth, but not the system. Marxist economics is the only one that looks at the system,
so I don’t think of it in terms of anything in Marx being outmoded. It seems to me that
Marx made a model of capitalism as a system and that it is still valid, except that
capitalism exists on a much larger scale than it did in his day. On the other hand,
Ernest Mandel has argued that since Marx is making a pure model of capitalism, a
35 thought model, of which England is only an incidental reference, in a way his model is
more accurate in terms of the current global system because this is a far purer
capitalism, one from which feudal elements have been eliminated far more
thoroughly and in which commodification, wage labor, and so forth are far more
extensively developed than they were in the older period.
40
Jack Amariglio and Yahya Madra: It would be nice to think that Marxism had
overcome its long-term tendency toward reductionist theorizing. The twentieth-
century orthodoxy that had stultified most of the theoretical and political innovations
in Marxism, especially in economic analysis, had mixed results. On the one hand, it
45 certainly contributed to handy simplifications that were, in some circumstances,
useful to galvanize worker and popular support and opinion; the ever present claims
that capitalism was facing a crisis of accumulation worked, at times, to encourage
Left activists that the end times were on our doorstep. On the other hand, much
mischief was also achieved under the sign of the necessary ‘‘laws of motion’’ of
50 capitalism, and the results were often, in contrast, quietism, repression of contrary
views and a demand for homogeneity. So, while we don’t think that it is likely that
orthodoxy has disappeared, nor do we think it has no role at all to play in the present
conjuncture, we do hope that its prominence and its outspoken support for
deterministic modes of analysis and propositions for action are relegated to a
55 subordinate place among today’s Marxists. What still seems urgent, though, is the
analysis of class and the process of exploitation. It has become de rigueur to bypass
Marxian class analysis in preference for either other social and economic distinctions
and movements, or in preference for old and new ‘‘sociological’’ notions of
class*/mostly connected to income level, or occupation, or property ownership*/that
60 that continue to function as displacements for Marx’s own determination that class, in
capitalism, has to do with how surplus value is produced and extracted/appropriated
and finally distributed. The hocus-pocus that now surrounds mainstream discussions
of the crisis and impending disappearance of the ‘‘middle class’’ badly misses the
question of the maintenance and extension*/on a global scale*/of worker
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370 SOFRONOV ET AL.
65 exploitation and the uses and misuses of surplus. Whether or not some so-called
middle class is under attack, it is certain, or at least it should be for Marxists, that the
current explosion in income and wealth for capitalists, financiers, realtors,
speculators, and others, and the relative decline in the living standards and incomes
of ‘‘the poor,’’ has its basis in increased and not diminished exploitation. It seems to
70 us that the analysis of how this increased exploitation has been recently achieved is of
the highest order of importance for Marxist thinkers.
Sofronov: Which are the main theoretical problems that Marxism needs to solve at
present?
Jameson: I think there’s a range of theoretical problems. The most obvious one is the
75 labor theory of value and the relationship to technology, the relationship to computer
production, and how the labor theory of value can account for the value that’s
produced by computers. Then I would say, in our period, the theory of commodity
fetishism, which seems to me was secondary in the Leninist period. It was never
absent, but it was not the dominant problem of the Marxism of that age of imperialism.
80 I think that today commodity fetishism is a primary phenomenon of capitalism. And
this is why what used to be called culture, or the cultural factor, or whatever, is now
really central to all Left politics or at least the Left politics of the first world. So those
are some fundamental changes. The way in which one analyzes the image and the
relationship of the image to commodification is an important theoretical problem. The
85 way in which the theory of ideology is to be understood today is an important
theoretical problem that some writers and philosophers have dealt with.
Then also when one comes to politics*/and, of course, Capital was never really a
politics*/the crucial question is the twofold one of organization and unemployment. It
seems to me that the political forces that need to be organized today are the forces that
90 are structurally unemployed. Consider how in globalization the whole continent of
Africa, for example, is being allowed to go down the drain, or how in almost all the
advanced countries the flight of industry and the transfer to information technology
have left masses of people unemployed. Of course, in our country, it’s a matter of race
and it’s black people, people who will never be employed. How does one organize that?
95 Because classical organization was based on workers, not on the unemployed, and this is
a very serious new kind of political problem. And along with that is the question of the
party, because nobody seems to want to go back to the Leninist party. If one looks at
Lenin’s own time and his own experience, the Bolshevik party was much more
democratic, and right up until October Lenin was in a minority in the Bolshevik party,
100 and so there was a lot more argument in that party. But, on the other hand, it was a party
that was not representing exactly but was standing in for a class that scarcely exists
anymore: namely, this peasantry, who had their own ideologues, of course, but were not
really represented by the Bolsheviks. So the question of the party and the ideological
resonance that the party has had since Stalin is an important political problem, and I
105 don’t think it’s solved. This is my major disagreement with Toni [Negri] and Michael
[Hardt] with Empire [2000]. I don’t think that you can just say, ‘‘We don’t need the party
and let’s just have this explosion of the multitude happen wherever it happens,’’ ‘‘We
