Left Center Left

Brad DeLong asks, perhaps rhetorically:

So can someone please come up with a short list–five one-sentence bullet points, for example–of the fundamental insights of Marxism considered as an intellectual enterprise?

Since this site used to be “Marxists for Keynes” — and since my own dissertation takes up the Marxist rubric in parts — I guess I should take a stab at this one. I always hold that Marxism is detrimental as an economic theory (and as political template, but that’s not an intellectual question, quite), but is still foundational to sociology and history. Here are the fundamental insights I see in them:

Historical materialism: Economic base isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of historical explanation, and histories that see culture as merely superstructure are sorely mistaken (Weber made this point quite well, even if he didn’t discount economic materialism in some instances.) Still, one of the central questions of historical explanation should be “Why this development at this time?” Pointing to underlying economic forces as a key generating mechanism for historical change remains a useful way to begin answering this question. Humanist (non-Marxist) explanations often fail in this task by assuming autochthonous birth of history or, worse, not even caring about deeper explanation.

Conflict model of social organization: 19th century sociologists by and large sought to impose models of natural science facilely to the social world. Spencer applied slapdash Darwinism, Comte applied the model of an organic society. (Durkheim was more careful in his analogies). But neither caught a total vision of society in constant struggle among competing interests who without even consciously trying tended to battle for their own gain in highly organized ways. It may be that someone comes along and demonstrates that the thesis that “Orleanists represented commercial capital and that the Legitimists represented landed capital” is wrong, but seeking explanation for political and social conflict in deeper economic and status interests is still worthwhile. For instance, I find Richard Hofstadter’s class readings of the Progressive Era or McCarthyism immensely useful for understanding the origins of their politics.

Overdetermination: Strict economic determinism doesn’t hold (if only sociology were that easy!), but people do have an extraordinary tendency to internalize the cultural trappings fitting their objective life chances. So while Marx didn’t discover class (it was understood intuitively by 19th century Europeans, who knew the difference between the aristocracy, bourgeoisie, petite bourgeoisie, working class, and lumpens when they saw them), Marx and those who followed him understood class as systematic and abstracted, structuring social life in a way that synthesizes one’s place in production hierarchy and seemingly unrelated cultural practices. Of course, Weber’s emphasis on status was a needed corrective, but Bourdieu has usefully shown how social status (”cultural capital” in his formulation) has a regularity and force of its own in structuring internalized cultural dispositions.

Ideology: Because of said internalization, some Marxist-inflected notion of ideology (namely, the tendency for objective interests to sublimate into political beliefs) seems useful, again correcting “objective interests” to reflect status as much as wealth proper… At least until we come up with a better notion to explain political idea systems.

In each of the above, thinkers after Marx have revised and refined Marxian approaches. Marxism becomes something much bigger than Marx himself. So maybe I’m not answering Brad’s question after all. For he seems to be saying the project of Marxist scholarship is useful, but the execution is lacking: “The writing of western European history as the rise, fall, and succession of ancient, feudal, and bourgeois modes of production is a fascinating project, but the only person to try it seriously soon throws the Marxist apparatus over the side, where it splashes and sinks to the bottom of the sea. ”

Maybe Marx doesn’t hold up to closer scrutiny of historical and sociological research. I, too, think that Weber (or, in other instances Durkheim) is just as important a thinker on these questions. I’m willing to jettison Marxism to the ocean floor if something better comes along. And I’ll admit that since I’m not a historian or sociologist, but a humanities scholar who has to rely on what he senses as useful history and sociology, I may easily be missing the truly valuable scholarship in these fields. Still, Marxism for me remains a useful scholastic attitude against scholarship which still takes individual self-understanding over the non-conscious foundations of historical change and social behavior.