Paper delivered to Maynooth (Re-)Birth of Marx(ism) conference, May 2018

14 min readMay 4, 2018

Title

De-historicising Class Composition

Author

Paul Bowman, independent scholar/activist

Abstract

The second half of the last century saw significant innovative contributions to Marxism including the class composition perspective from the Italian operaist and autonomist movements and the French post-structuralist critique of “orthodox” Marxism of Althusser & co, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari. Although work has been done in integrating the class composition perspective with those of Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari by a number of post-autonomist writers, Althusser’s critique of historicism has not yet been adequately incorporated. This paper aims to apply the Althusserian critique of historicism to class composition to achieve two main objectives. First to clearly distinguish between class composition at the level of particular states or societies, the societal class composition (SCC) and the class composition at the level of the global capitalist market, the global class composition (GCC). Only a proper understanding of the articulation of different societal class compositions within the global class composition can afford us a workable analysis of the current conjuncture. Secondly, the corollary of the Althusserian critique of historicism, the rejection of any logico-historical ontology of existing capitalist societies enables us to obtain the sublation of the opposition between so-called “class fundamentalist” and intersectional social ontologies necessary for the political recomposition of the class in the current conjuncture. An Althusserian post-historicist ontology allows us to overcome the long-standing division between Marxism and feminism and to answer the call of international revolutionaries such as the Zapatistas and the Kurdish Freedom Movement for an alternative to capitalist modernity.

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The challenge

The challenge of re-thinking Marxism for the 21st century is to overcome the most significant problems of orthodox or so-called “classical” Marxism of the 19th and 20th centuries, that are blockages on its utility for the majority of the global proletariat in the current conjuncture. To meet that challenge we have at our disposal a number of tools which have already been developed by Marxist thinkers departing from and critiquing the orthodox Marxism of the official Communist parties in the post-war period. One such being the analysis of class composition bequeathed us by operaismo and autonomia.

To understand the different challenges of our current 21st century conjuncture and that of the late 19th and early 20th, we need to sketch the changing class composition between these eras.

The conjuncture

The former era, the one who’s long death-knell was first broadcast to the world by a shortwave pirate radio burst of morse code from O’Connell street on 25 April 1916, we can call the colonial era. The global composition of the labouring masses divided the world roughly into an imperialist core, with predominantly industrial proletarian working class, and a colonised world, the majority of humanity, with a still mostly peasant composition of the exploited masses. Today, in the 21st C, having passed through the era of decolonisation struggles, the neo-colonialism of the Cold War era, and the rise of globalisation in the container-ised, post-Vietnam War, post-Mao era, the formal domination of capitalism in the colonial era is overtaken by the real subsumption of the whole of humanity to capitalist relations of production. The international or global class composition (GCC) is dominated by proletarianised masses everywhere, which is to say that the international working class is predominantly non-Western or outside of eurocentrism’s reference cultures. In other words, the priority challenge of making Marxism relevant to the majority of the global working class in the current conjuncture, is to free it of its eurocentrist deformations.

In fact, the need to reconfigure Marxism to meet the needs of regions outside of the so-called “advanced” countries of Western Europe and North America, is not new, dating in fact back to the Russian revolution. Because the orthodox Marxism of German socialdemocracy, Kautsky et al, defined itself in opposition to the “revisionism” of Bernstein, Lenin’s first revision of orthodoxy declared itself anti-revisionist. A move followed by Mao’s second revision, breaking from the Moscow line of the 3rd International. Today we can see the political evolutions of movements like the Zapatistas of Mexico or the Apo-ists of Kurdistan, as the first elements of a third wave of revision. As both the EZLN and the PKK emerged from Maoist orthodoxy they have both dispensed with the pretense of trying to mask their revisionism under the fig-leaf of anti-revisionism — there’s only so far you can go before the law of diminishing returns imposes itself. But in all three cases, the eruption of insurrectionary rupture in the so-called periphery, outside the “core” of eurocentric reference, has lead to a need to revise Marxism to adapt to local conditions, far from the Manchester cotton mills or tractor factories of old. Of course this begs the question of how much revisionism you can actually do before the accusation that “it’s not proper Marxism” has to be met with a shrug, rather than a defence, but we’ll come back to that.

So to continue in the vein of the 3rd revision to decolonise Marxism from its eurocentric deviations, we need to decolonise the social, the first step being to decolonise time. And this is where Althusser’s critique of historicism and its ideological concept of time, comes in useful.

Decolonising Time

In the second half of the 20th century national liberation struggles fought to decolonise geographical space. To bring our theory into the 21st century we need to match that by decolonising time, specifically social historical time.

Althusser — the critique of ideological time

Again — refer to my fuller treatment on Medium “Historicism, Modernism & the Left: Part 2, Historicism”. (Takes the time that it takes to understand and overcome ideological thinking)

2) The contemporaneity of time, or the category of the historical present. This second category is the condition of possibility of the first one, and in it we find Hegel’s central thought. If historical time is the existence of the social totality we must be precise about the structure of this existence. The fact that the relation between the social totality and its historical existence is a relation with an immediate existence implies that this relation is itself immediate. In other words: the structure of historical existence is such that all the elements of the whole always coexist in one and the same time, one and the same present, and are therefore contemporaneous with one another in this present. This means that the structure of the historical existence of the Hegelian social totality allows what I propose to call an ‘essential section’ (coupe d’essence), i.e., an intellectual operation in which a vertical break is made at any moment in historical time, a break in the present such that all the elements of the whole revealed by this section are in an immediate relationship with one another, a relationship that immediately expresses their internal essence.

Analogy of MRI scan of the brain. The “essential section” in which every element is in a direct, essentialist relation to all the other elements as part of a Hegelian totality, is like looking at an MRI slice through the head and talking of the eyeballs connection to the areas of brain, and ignoring the blood vessels appearing as simple holes in the slice. Cf Sociology’s rejection of structural-functionalism. Change becomes impossible from internal processes, hence recourse to external teleological drivers. Orthodox marxism gets around this by reference to “contradictions” as an internal element, but usually this is masking a hidden appeal to external teleological drivers such as the forces of production/relations of production meta-narrative that is really apriori and teleological.

This is where we are led by ignoring the basic distinction Marx was careful to draw between the object of knowledge and the real object, between the ‘development of forms’ of the concept in knowledge and the development of the real categories in concrete history: to an empiricist ideology of knowledge, and to the identification of the logical and the historical in Capital itself. It should hardly surprise us that so many interpreters go round in circles in the question that hangs on this definition, if it is true that all problems concerned with the relation between the logical and the historical in Capital presuppose a non-existent relation. Whether this relation is imagined as one which brings the terms featured in the two orders of development (the development of the concept; the development of real history) into direct one-to-one correspondence; or whether the same relation is imagined as one which brings the terms of the two orders of development into inverse correspondence (the basis for the theses of Della Volpe and Pietranera analysed by Rancière in this volume), there remains the hypothesis of a relation where no relation exists.

The logico-historical thing we will come back to, shortly. On ideological time:

Like the synchronic, which is the primary concept, the diachronic therefore presupposes both of the very two characteristics I have isolated in the Hegelian conception of time: an ideological conception of historical time

Ideological, because it is clear that this conception of historical time is merely a reflection of the conception Hegel had of the type of unity that constitutes the link between all the economic, political, religious, aesthetic, philosophical and other elements of the social whole. Because the Hegelian whole is a ‘spiritual whole’ in the Leibnizian sense of a whole in which all the parts ‘conspire’ together, in which each part is a pars totalis, the unity of this double aspect of historical time (homogeneous-continuity/contemporaneity) is possible and necessary.

So I hope no-one has a headache already, how do these ideas impact on our politics?

Historical time is neither Geological time nor Meridional time

Our two most common reference points or paradigms for time, are geological time and diurnal or meridional time.

Geological or epochal time is global, which is to say geographically non-specific. We can find the K/T boundary that separates the Mezozoic and Cenozoic areas everywhere on the planet. By ideological extension, when make statements like “we are living in the postmodern era” the “we” applies equally to Uber drivers in New York, phone centre workers in Bangalore, Foxconn factory workers in Shenzhen, Palestinian refugees in camps in Beirut, horse nomads in Mongolia or Yanomami indians in the Amazon. That’s not materialism, it’s a mess. Worse it’ a Hegelian mess, which is to say idealism. Similarly eurocentric historical periodisations like the medieval period make such little sense in, say the history of China, that many historians just don’t bother with the anachronism that is “medieval China”

Diurnal or meridional time is the “time of day” relative to the middle of the day. To transpose this to different geographical locations around the globe, the imperialist powers of Europe defined meridian lines that ran through their capitals, whether the Greenwich observatory in London, or it’s Parisian counterpart. Today Greenwich Mean Time has been renamed “Coordinated Universal Time” or UTC. (This rebranding of literally eurocentric temporal order as “universal” is symptomatic of the whole problem of facile misrepresentation of eurocentric norms as universal). But in relation to the conventional meridian, all other timezones exist on a unilinear dimension of forwardness or backwardness. Rojava is 2 hours ahead of Dublin, Chiapas is 6 hours behind, Dublin and London are as one, regardless of 1916 and Brexit.

Both of these notions of time are everyday and real enough. They become ideological only when we apply them to the history of social development and expect the latter to conform to the single speed, single track framework of the former as if social development was a bowling ball, rolling down the lane of history towards the pins of revolution.

Different time-zones

In the middle of the 2011 struggle in Egypt to overthrow Mubarak, one commentator said that he found himself living in a Cairo divided into two overlapping timezones, one in which Mubarak was still in power and one in which he had already fallen. This is the kind of timezone we are interested in, in terms of social development, historical development.

Back to Althusser — single frame of reference (“Present”, agents, material reality) but that does not imply a single, unified process. The althusserian model is a “multi-threaded” reality in which multiple processes, each operating at their own peculiar speeds and rhythms (smooth evolutions, jagged ruptures, or what have you). These are happening within a particular societies time zone. We can talk of a western timezone, an Indian timezone, a Syrian civil war timezone. All these timezones share the present as a commons, without each being in some way the future or the past of the other. There is no “I have seen the future and it works/doesn’t work”.

No “backwards”/”forwards” — whenever we hear the word “backwards” applied to a country or culture, this is a modernist fallacy that relies on the hegelian-ideological conception of historical time. Also, anticipating slightly, we think of “backwardness” in terms of absence or lack, lack of modernity, absence of contemporaneity, rather than presence of altereity, of an equally valid, equally present, but distinct, timezone.

Different social assemblages — cf patriarchal-tribal assemblage and the role of ‘ird/namus/izzat.

No “superstitions” — does a social abstraction materially mediate people’s lives, their self-reproduction, both biopolitically and economically — if so then it is a real abstraction.

Class composition must be understood on 2 co-existing levels — local and global

Just as in the 19th C the factory workers in Engels’ Manchester mill relied on cotton produced by African-American slaves in the Southern US, so today the local technical composition of the class needs to be situated in an interdependent relation with the other local compositions to which they are economically tied by inter-societal trade flows. We’re back to the themes of Trotsky’s Uneven and Combined Development. Following Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu, we note the lamentable neglect and under-development of Trotsky’s breakthrough contribution, even by Trotskyists, in favour of the more orthodox historicism of Lenin’s “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”. I submit this more than a century of neglect is due to the blinkering role of historicist prejudices.

Decolonising the social — race, class and gender beyond logico-historical capitalism

Not going to reinvent the wheel. The “unhappy marriage of marxism and feminism” has been raging on, unresolved, for over half a century at least (if not longer). Marxism owes it to the majority of the working class to sort its shit out on this question. Read the Aruzza dossier. Again we’re back to Althusser’s detection that the logico-historical fallacy in based on this ideological Hegelian historicism that takes a dogmatic structural-functionalist line that if any existing complex of social relations, in this case patriarchal ones, cannot be shown to be an integral and irreplaceable part of the core functioning of the capitalist mode of production’s immanent drive to the valorisation of capital, then its non-essential nature means that it is a “merely cultural” ghost of a previous mode of production, in the process of rapidly “melting into air” or “withering away” of its own accord. That’s no less bullshit in Dublin than it is in Diyarbakr.

Aruzza proposes three alternatives — 1. a single system ontology in which capital is all, and anything else is merely “residual” hangovers from pre-capitalist history; 2. Dual (or multi-) system ontology, like Heidi Hartmann’s (potentially extended to include race, etc); or 3. A single system ontology in which distinct but not independent processes are overdetermined by their own inner dynamic in conflict or encounter with other processes. Option 3, which is Aruzza’s chosen option, is clearly Althusserian in inspiration. Interestingly, none of Aruzza’s three opponents take option 2, the dual-/multi-systems approach.

[On that point it’s worth noting that the current intellectual fashion for “intersectionality”, fails to clarify which side of the single-system, dual-system dichotomy it choses — a seriously crippling ambiguity given the need to pick one to make any progress towards clarity]

But, as Aruzza herself points out in her response piece to her three critics, despite their differences, they all take the logico-historical presupposition as read that to cede to Ellen Meiksins Wood (in this case) that gender oppression/patriarchy is not a logically essential component of the capitalist relations of production, means that it (the patriarchy) is ontologically secondary, “merely cultural”, Nebenwiederspruch.

We can make reference to Derrida’s logocentrism/metaphysics of presence in relation to reducing social ontology to the orthodox binary of base and superstructure, in which only one side is authentic (base) and the other is a shadow/lack (superstructure) i.e. “merely cultural”.

Conclusions

As a young anarchist, I always dismissed Althusser because I was told that he was a structuralist Marxist, who’s reactionary goal was to rehabilitate French stalinism and orthodox Marxism. Indeed, the very idea that some dead French colonial bourgeois intellectual who murdered his wife, could have anything useful, theoretically, for feminist or post-colonial thought, unlike the cooler post-structuralist (dead white Frenchmen) who succeeded him, seems totally counter-intuitive. And yet, without wanting to defend Althusser the man, or his project, to separate his critique of historicism from post-structuralism, rather than seeing in it, in many ways its point of departure (along with Derrida, of course), is a mistake. The critique of historicism and ideological conceptions of time lie behind the eurocentric blinkers of orthodox Marxism, that we need to get beyond. The usefulness of his critique of the logico-historical fallacy, based on the critique of historicism, is highly useful in breaking down the long-lasting aporia between Marxism and feminism, and reminds us that the “death of the author” applies as much to political theory as fiction — that the failings, or worse, of the maker of theory cannot limit the application of the theory produced, by the power of ad hominem dismissal alone.

Conjuncturally we are moving into the post-industrial era — one where the industrial revolution completes its task of reducing secondary sector to the marginal proportion that the agricultural revolution reduced the primary to. In that era, the class conflict between the self-valorisation reproductive cycles of capital and labour become more and more directly the conflict between capital’s self-aggrandizement and the reproduction of human life and culture. That conflict takes place in the common ground of both circuits, not merely within the factory, but within the city itself.

Returning finally to the question of where we stand today in relation to Marxism as such, I feel that the failures of orthodox Marxism, both theoretical and historical, divide us into 3 main groups. First those in denial that there is anything fundamentally wrong with orthodox Marxism (the deniers). Second those who rejected Marx from the outset and see the failures of orthodox Marxism as the inevitable result of an irretrievably flawed theory (the naysayers). Thirdly, the rest of us who accept that the orthodox reading of Marx is (and always was) fatally wrong, but still believe not only that another Marx is possible, but necessary. Many have already contributed to that third position, I hope I have interested you in including Althusser’s critique of historicism in your own review of that already existing work. I leave you with my favourite quote from Felix Guattari.

“Felix Guattari: I have never taken seriously the notion that we have outgrown Marxism and that we are now on the verge of a new political era. I have never considered ideas, theories or ideologies as anything but instruments or tools. Whence this expression, which has had a certain success and has since been used by Michel Foucault, that ideas and concepts are all part of a “tool box.” As tools they can be changed, borrowed, stolen or used for another purpose. So what does it mean, “the end of Marxism”? Nothing, or only that certain Marxist tools are no longer working, that others are in need of review, that others continue to be perfectly valid. Hence it would be stupid to junk them all. All the more so in that re-evaluating these concepts means re-examining them — exactly as a re-evaluation of Einstein’s theories includes a re-examination of Newton’s. One can’t say that Newtonianism is totally dead. We are dealing here with a “rhizome” of instruments; certain branches of the rhizome collapse, little sprouts begin to proliferate, etc. For me Marxism in general has never existed. I have sometimes borrowed or adapted some Marxist concepts I could put to good use. Moreover, I like reading Marx. He’s a great writer. As an author he’s unbeatable.”