Antipode 20:1, 1988, p. 60-66 ISSN 0066 4812 POST-MODERNISM AND MARXISM JULIE GRAHAM At the 1987 Association of American Geographers (AAG) meetings in Portland, Oregon, the confrontation between postmodernism and Marxism dominated a number of sessions. Like their forerunners and counterparts outside of geography, the post-modernists often did not attack Marxism directly. They simply avoided the language of Marxism; or they ignored Marxism. But their rejection of totalizing discourse and metanarrative was perceived as a rejection of Marxism, which it typically was, and many Marxists reacted as though attacked, leading to very tense debates. What is post-modernism? Using the oppositional rhetoric that characterizes the most obstreperous post-modernism, one might summarize the postmodern point of view on Marxist geography as follows: Marxism and class are dead, but geography and locality are alive and well. More generally, modernism, homogeneity, rationality, mass production, metanarrative, tract housing, and space are dead. Long live post-modernism, pluralism, power and desire, small batch production, local narrative, indigenous architecture, and place. A salient characteristic of post-modernism is its participation in discourse theory, which reveals its roots in structuralism. The underlying structures are gone (where you once had langue and parole, you now only have parole) but the conception of knowledge as discourse remains, with its devastating implications for correspondence notions of truth. In every other respect, postmodernism is a post-structuralist discourse. It gives us fragments where there was wholeness, change where there was stasis, openendedness and pastiche where we once had formal closure and underlying relations of depth. Most appealingly, it gives us the t Department of Geology and Geography, University of Massachusetts, Amherst MA 01003
POST-MODERNISM AND MARXISM 61 'ineluctability of difference' (Bod, 1986) rather than the search for sameness in a structured world. Of course, post-modernism is a hydra-headed monster and a chameleon, impossible to characterize without entering into lifethreatening contradictions. It crops up everywhere, in every kind of discourse and practice (see Dear (1986) for an interesting way of sorting out the post-modern tradition). If it is difficult to characterize, it is at the same time easy to recognize. According to Richard Osborne (1987, p. 12), the unifying project of postmodernism is 'contesting the dominant definition of things, the consensus, whether political or academic, and interrupting the flow of apparent realities... Post-modernism could be summed up as a belief that large-scale ideas and political philosophies are inherently dangerous. (The terror of the totality). In its place we need to celebrate the fragmentation of subjectivity. ' Post-modernism is reflected in the post-marxist socialist politics of the 'new social movements' or 'socialist pluralism' (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Bowles and Gintis, 1986). It expresses itself in Foucault's micro-politics and the new politics of localities. It can be found in the economics of post-fordism, in flexible integration as an industrial strategy (Cooke, 1987), or in localities research. (These are probably the most prominent areas in which Marxist geographers encounter and generate a post-modern discourse.) It can be unquestionably Marxist (see, for example, Eagleton, 1986) or militantly anti-marxist (Aronowitz, 1981). It can be serious about social issues or frivolous and individualistic. Among Marxist geographers there are a number of reactions and adjustments to the advent of post-modernism, whatever it may be, on the intellectual and cultural scene. Many have embraced elements of post-modernism within their Marxism (e.g. Cooke, 1987). This has given rise to suspicions among others that the taint will ultimately spread to the whole, and that what started out as the importation of certain post-modern stances into Marxism will end up as post-marxism. According to this latter view, post-modernism is simply a fashionable exit from the rigors of Marxist analysis and the wearying life of political and intellectual struggle. It is not surprising, therefore, that the 1980s should produce a post-modern, post-marxist geography. Rather it is seen as a belated expression, in the geographic backwater, of the yuppie individualist ethic and the rightward political shift that we see in the population generally. Post-modernism is the aesthetic and cultural manifestation of neo-conservatism and the Marxists who flirt with it are revealing their inner desire to move with their social cohort to the right.
62 JULIE GRAHAM This defensive reaction from Marxist geographers is certainly understandable, because post-modernism is deeply implicated in the current 'crisis of Marxism'. But the message of postmodernism is not simply, or necessarily, a message from the right. The post-modern movement carries a serious critical message that Marxists should consider. The general critique that post-modernism offers to established modern discourses is the critique of essentialism. With respect to Marxism, this critique focuses on the Marxist illusion that class (or production, or accumulation) is the fundamental ground of reality rather than a social process constituted as a focal theoretical category within one of many competing discourses. From this perspective, post-modernism's rejection of the Marxist 'master discourse' is a recent version of the longstanding rejection of Marxist economism (here understood in the broad sense of economic determinism as well as in the narrow sense of workerism). The specificity of the post-modern critique lies in its concomitant critique of structuralism and, more particularly, of the 'totalizing discourse' of structural Marxism, with its vision of a social totality dominated by an underlying structure of economic relations and tendencies. In this vision the subject, as well as all objects, of discourse are subsumed to the totality; and all discourses are subordinated, as ideology or partial truth, to the Marxist meta-discourse. The concept of class is a 'privileged' concept, the touchstone of truth reflecting the ultimate reality from which all other realities issue. The recent rejection of economism has many different roots and many implications for Marxism. One positive critical force has been the evolution of political movements centered on issues of patriarchy, race, sexuality, and the environment. These movements do not explain the world in terms of class, nor do they envision the working class as an entity with intrinsic revolutionary potential. They ignore or reject Marxism to the extent that they perceive it as asserting the hegemony of class, in socialist politics and in social explanation. What does it mean for Marxism? I have been arguing that the movement from modern, structuralist Marxism to post-modern, post-structuralist, post-marxism does not always represent a rightward shift, an individualistic rejection of collectivism, a boredom with class and a bourgeois fascination with democracy, or a cynical abandonment of the quest for under-
POST-MODERNISM AND MARXISM 63 standing. It may simply represent the rejection of the essentialism with which Marxism has become identified. But what I find particularly interesting and ironic is that many post-modern, post-marxist critiques of Marxism tend to do exactly what they accuse Marxism of doing - they essentialize. (See Carchedi s (1987) response, in this journal, to a critique of Marxist essentialism that essentializes Marxism.) They construct a unitary, unchanging essence called Marxism and then they demolish it with scorn. Let me cite a very prominent example. For Bowles and Gintis, who entered their post-marxist phase with Democracy and Capitalism (1986), there is only one Marxism. That Marxism is a teleological official discourse emerging from the Second International in which economic laws govern social development and objective class positions form the basis of politics. Given the Bowles and Gintis portrayal, it is clear that this rigid and archaic discourse must be rejected. This tendency to essentialize Marxism means that when Marxists abandon essentialism, they often abandon the focus on class as well. It is as though Marxism, essentialism, and class were all part of the same thing, each reducible to a common essence. When you reject one, you must reject the others. Thus, Ellen Wood (1986) notes with dismay that the autonomization of politics and ideology (the retreat from essentialism ) has been associated with a retreat from class. Practicing a reverse reductionism, she advocates a return to Marxist essentialism as a way of restoring the primacy of class in socialist discourse. Yet class, Marxism and essentialism are not reducible to each other, any more than post-modernism is reducible to right wing ideology. Marxism, like any other tradition, is rl multiple and contradictory discourse, in which essentialism and anti-essentialism are currently at war. This means that it is possible to participate in the post-modern critique of essentialism and still to be a Marxist whose work focuses (or may not focus) on class. Ernest0 Laclau characterizes himself as a Marxist pursuing a non-reductionist, Gramscian vision of socialist politics. Terry Eagleton practices an anti-essentialist, Marxist literary criticism. More ambiguously, Alain Lipietz (1986) quotes Umberto Eco admiringly as an exemplar of anti-essentialist approaches to explanation and then goes on to depict a world governed by capital accumulation. Postmodernism is thus more than an anti-marxist critique leveled at Marxism from outside, it is an emerging tradition within Marxism. Marxism is dead. Long live Marxisms. At the AAG meetings, an alternative Marxism focused on class without being economistic was not discussed (or at least not in
64 JULIE GRAHAM public sessions). I would express this alternative in terms of the following vision of a Marxist project. Rather than asserting that class (or production, or capital accumulation) is the fundamental reality - the essence - of social life, our task as Marxists is to constitute class as an object of social and political discourse. If Marxists can acknowledge that their discourse is but one of many discourses, they can make themselves heard in the postmodern cacophony. If they continue to privilege Marxism as the only true discourse, they will very quickly silence themselves in the ears of others. For Marxism is patently not alone, or primary, in the community of discourses. Marxism is, however, unique. Within the epistemological framework of discourse theory, we cannot make the empiricist argument that we practice Marxism because it focuses on realities that are more fundamental than the objects of other discourses. But we can put forward Marxism s unique and specific character as the grounds of its appeal. Marxism is the only social theory that is focussed on class, i.e., on the performance, appropriation and distribution of surplus labor and the class positions that are created by that process (Resnick and Wolff, 1987). According to Karl Marx in Capital, the processes of exploitation (Vol. I) and of capitalist class formation (Vol. 111) are mutually and dialectically constitutive of the rest of social life. Class affects (or over-determines) the other processes of social life just as those aspects affect (or over-determine) the aspect of class. To study the intricate relationship between capitalist exploitation (the production and appropriation of surplus labor in value form) and all the other aspects of a capitalist society is, arguably, our unique project as Marxists. To think about what a politics of class would be and how it would interact with other forms of politics in a socialist project, that is our unique political task. We can grant the shakiness of correspondence theories of truth - Marxism doesn t have to be the only truth about society. We can grant that class struggle and the economic trajectory of capitalism are not the essential core of an epiphenomena1 universe. We can grant that the politics of the environment, sexuality, feminism, race, and nationalism are not distractions based on an ideological retreat from class but reflections of competing understandings of this world and competing (or complementary) visions of a new world. Our project is not to subsume the issues that engage the minds and motivate the actions of others to the issue of class, but to relate class to these issues. In a world where class does not deter-
POST-MODERNISM AND MARXISM 65 mine everything else but is related to everything else through a process of mutual constitution, it is our job as Marxists to construct the connections between class and everything else in the form of a discourse. The challenge of post-modernism to Marxism is potentially very exciting. Post-modern anti-essentialism invites us to free ourselves of the burdens which we long have carried - the burden of explaining a complex and multifaceted history with a limited set of categories, of revealing rather than constituting the centrality of class, of waiting for politics rather than entering politics, of scorning non-marxism as an intellectual and political error rather than engaging it in its many forms and relating it to Marxism by relating Marxism to it. Post-modernism is not intrinsically right wing any more than feminism is. It does not necessarily deny the existence or importance of class relations, any more than feminism does. Rather, post-modernism resists the subordination of all experience and social life to class struggle and the laws of accumulation, as Marxism can and should. References Aronowitz, S. (1981) The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics and Culture in Marxist Theory. New York: Praeger. Bod, P. A. (1986) "The ineluctability of difference: scientific pluralism and the critical intelligence. " In J. Arac (Ed.) Postmodernism and Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 3-25. Bowles, S. and H. Gintis (1986) Democracy and Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Carchedi, G. (1987) Popular movements and socialist development. Antipode, 19:216-221. Cooke, P. (1987) "Space, culture and the paradigm of postmodernity." Unpublished paper, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Dear, M. J. (1986) Postmodernism and planning. Society and Space, 4:367-384. Eagleton, T. (1986) Against the Grain. London: Verso. Laclau, E. and C. Mouffe (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso, Lipietz, A. (1986) New tendencies in the international division of labor: regimes of accumulation and modes of regulation. In A. J. Scott and M. Storper (Eds.) Production, Work, Territo y. Boston: Allen & Unwin, pp. 16-40. Osbome, R. (1987) Politics, philosophy and the new intelligentsia. Interlink, 1:12-13. Resnick, S. A. and R. D. Wolff (1987) Knowledge and Class: a Marxian Critique of Political Economy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wood, E. M. (1986) The Retreat from Class: a New 'True' Socialism. London: Verso.