book notes
Marx unbound Arnaud Spire interviews Daniel Bensaid Repy newspaper mate, the newspaper the French Communist Party
Daniel Bensaid, lecturer in philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII, has recently published two works, each of which invites us to take a fresh look at Marx's contribution to understanding our societies in the year 2000. His Marx 'Intempestit (Untimely Marx) takes a sledgehammer to the dogmatic mausoleum which commentators have imprisoned the author of Capital. La Discordance des Temps (Times out of Joint) is a radical critique of the marketplace modernity of contemporary neo-liberalism.
Bensaïd invites us to replace a determinist conception of the world with a universe made up of various possibilities, governed by tendential laws. He proposes a revolution in our understanding of time itself.
Bensaid has undertaken to help with the current efforts to deconstruct and reconstruct an entirely new Marx. He has set out to rethink Marx's thought, from which the movement for the emancipation of peoples is already unknowingly drawing sustenance at this close of the century. Marx L'Intempestif and La Discordance des Temps appeared almost simultaneously at the end of 1995. These books' originality - which has little to do with their choice of subject - makes it impossible to talk about a "return to Marx"; rather, they invite us to recognise the explosive possibilities of this thinker, freed at last from his chains. • Given how urgent it is to solve the problems that the earth's peoples face in their search for development, some people say that those who laid claim to Marx in the past could lighten their loads now by dropping this theoretical baggage. What do you think?
I try to avoid confusing the time scales of political urgency with those of effective thought, which are slower. Since 1989 there have been major upheavals in the world. It seemed necessary to me to take stock of our baggage. Some charitable souls began by advising us to throw off this baggage in order to lighten our load; but I have never believed in starting from scratch in this way. For me, the issue is understanding which Marx we need today, and whether the way we read him is legitimate. A fundamental text like Marx's work in all its abundance obviously lends itself to a multiplicity of interpretations. Our interpretation should be neither arbitrary nor founded on fantasy. It has to really confront the text, in order to shed light on those aspects of it that have long been put in the shade by the positivist influences of the Second International. This task places us in a long time scale, one of redefinition and reconstruction. The questions are posed to us by reality, whether we are discussing the national question or contemporary science or the metamorphosis of classes.
Working out responses means refusing to deck ourselves out in the neo-liberals new ideological clothes. • Do you think that the co-existence of many different interpretations of Marx has become a precondition for keeping his thought and militant activity alive in today's world?
Of course we have to talk to one another. But this does not mean that we have to accept anything that comes along in the name of political pluralism, which is one of the practical preconditions for democracy. We can criticise democracy as it functions today, in its parliamentary forms.
We can also imagine more direct forms of democracy, genuine citizens democracy. Nonetheless, in order to formulate a project for a new society, we have to bring many diverse ideas together, if we want our projec to gain societal and political support. This has nothing to do with eclecticism. In my opinion a political organisation needs a minimum basis of agreement on the major issues of the epoch: international events, wars, revolutions,
This does not mean that we have to settle theoretical issues in the same way as political ones. Anyone can speak about class struggle in an organisation's congress, but the congress is not going to vote on a definition. There is thus a different sphere, whose rhythm of development does not call on ordinary decision-making procedures. On this level there is room for a kind of theoretical pluralism. At the beginning of La Discordance des Temps I speak of "readings" of Capital. "Readings" in the plural. We cannot re-read Marx without thinking of the major controversies that have been grafted on to his legacy. Our way of looking at Marx has necessarily been enriched over the course of the century. To declare my allegiance: for me,
Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin are the ones who enabled me to unearth a
Marx of which the orthodoxies have perhaps preserved too little.
I think it is still more important to situate oneself correctly within the overall logic of Capital in order to carry on discussions that have been blocked by one- sided readings. In Marx there is no theory of crises and no theory of classes. The question of productive labour still has to be examined more profoundly. Only when we have understood the overarching logic that binds together the three volumes of Capital is the problem of the relationship between value and price or the delimitation of classes illuminated in a completely different way.
This is why in my opinion the unfinished chapter on classes is at the right place in volume 3, where it plays an inaugural role. • Following Ernest Mandel, you emphasise the unprecedented role of time, as a measure of production and reproduction, and social relationship in Marx's work. Is the conception of time introduced by Marx really different from that of origin-development-andend, of before-during-and-after, that each of us believes we can discover from experience?
Contrary to the myth that Marx saw a universal history coming to its end and sealing itself off, I maintain that the texts of 1845-46 - The Holy Family, The German Ideology, The Theses on Feuerbach - break explicitly and definitively with speculative philosophies of history like Kant's or Hegel's But breaking with these concep thinking diff
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* Book notes scious of itself in a temporal framework. Therefore neither the sacred time of religion -the time of revelation and creation - nor the abstract time of physics exists in Marx's work; instead he constructs a time which is first and formost a social relationship: not just one time, but several, inter-linked temporalities. There is a time of production, which is the time of exploitation; there 1s a time of circulation, which already gives rise to rhythmic discordance and possibilities of crisis; and there is a time of reproduction. So there is an organisation of time which is totally immanent to the movement of capital itself.
Value is the time taken by socially necessarv labour. But labour is not itself quantifiable. It is in a sense retro-determined by competition and price formation. There are in addition social relationships today that cannot be measured by labour time as capital determines it. How can domestic labour - which is still essentially female labour - be quantified; and everything that has to do with ecology, such as the renewal of energy flows and the damage done to forests and water? Marx realised that this measurement of all wealth in terms of socially necessary labour time would become an impoverished measurement. believe that in many respects we have already reached this point.
Finally, the innovation concerns physicists' time, which was a necessary prop for the idea of causality. A causes B only if the time that links these two phenomena is homogeneous and measurable. Marx would have liked to find laws of the same kind as the laws of physics. But he realised that political economy behaved in bizarre, irregular, problematic ways. So he speaks about "tendential laws". He is in search of new, broadened forms of causality. Since then, with the development of modern physics - theories of psyches, systems theory, information theory -we have moved further in this direction. • So Marx anticipated in the domain of history a concept of time, at once singular and plural, that seems since then to have been extended to nature? Classical physics invited us to discover a deterministic world and irreversible laws. Did Marx envisage a world made up of possibilities and governed by tendential laws?
We are speaking of a complex causality, pointing in different directions, which is different from the causality implied by classical determinism. Of course the transformation of a system is determined by its own contraditions. And not everything is possible at every moment. But the result development is not predictable with hindsight. This is what physicists say today. Among several hypotheses we can determine which one is desirable and make it come true. Gramsci, who rejected any speculative teleology, already paid homage to this form of teleology, which is implied in millenarian heresies and which gives meaning to human effort. Even if he relegated it to footnotes, almost in order to jog his own memory, Marx laborated certain categories or notions allowing us to think our own history in this way. Contrary to the causal determinism that is attributed to him, he thinks precisely about the discordance of the juridical, asthetic and economic realms. These different things do not all move to the Dowil Boevid same rhythms. There
LA discORdANcE dEs TEMpS are already elements Esis sue les caiss, les classes, l'histoine here of an idea of development, of counterpoint, of nonsynchonicity.
From this point of view, one can say that the order of the market does not Es canio correspond to the IE BA PASSIE order of capital. I know that there is a debate over this. From the moment when capital takes charge not just of exchange but also directly of production, the film can no longer be rewound, and the idea of a market without capital, without competition, without unemployment seems to be a purely imaginary wish.
From the standpoint of economic rationality, and in the framework of a socialist transition, it would be absurd to socialise small-scale retail trade, for example, and even small enterprises. On the other hand, given for example the scandal over privatization of water, there is a need for a regulatory process in which the political level fully plays its role.
Fortunately history is not stingy with in
Unfortunately, the discussion 1s skewed by clichés whose force derives from what people see in front of their faces. Nonetheless we cannot evade the question of property, of where decisions are made. Today people talk about a "workplace of citizens". I think that the essence of the capitalist firm is in fact despotism: in the organization of production time and the division of labour, as well as in its forms of discipline. By contrast, everything about public services raises the issue of social property (as opposed to generalised property), property which is capable of orienting the economy politically. There are also of course issues like the tax system, or the way of posing the question of housing and [working-class] suburbs in relation to real estate interests, but above all there is the need to socialise certain means of production and communication: even if this is insufficient. All this leads me to say that, even if capitalism is not doing so well, it continues to be the really existing social order, and we are far from figuring out how getting around it could really lead to abolishing it. In the current situation, everything that limits exploitation, and everything that defines a job as an inalienable right, brings us a step further in this direction. • Isn't it this thinking about time and capital which leads you to deepen the connection between class struggle and other modes of social conflict?
The idea that struggle constitutes classes is not new. The same idea can be found in Althusser's Daniel Bensaid work. Social classes exist only in their
Marx conflictual relationships l'intempestif with one anther. In this respect, the innovation contributed by Marx is
Grandeurs et misères d'une arenture critique often poorly
(xIx" - xx" siècles) understood. The French academic tradition in sociology, from Auguste Comte to Emile Durkheim, gets in the way. In this tradition of sociology, thought is meant to be classificatory. Social categories are lined up in relation to one anther. I do not despise this empirical type of sociology: it is useful. But Marx's approach is not primarily sociological. It consists in grasping in motion an antagonistic relationship between capital and labour: first in production; then in circulation, between the purchase and sale of labour-power; and then in reproduction. The way in which the preconditions for the reproduction of labourpower intermesh makes the whole process conflictual. Today we have to think about the plurality of conflicts without letting them play themselves out as completely disparate conflicts. There are conflicts between states and nations, and conflictual relationships between the sexes, among communities or religions: but all this, in my opinion, is intelligible in the light of its class underpinnings.
I believe that if we separate national questions from class relationships they very quickly become regressive, particularly if they are not accompanied by forms of association, by the will to stay in dialogue or in relationship with the other. In this respect the nation has had the function of overcoming particularisms. It was a step forward toward openness and universality. There is still undeniably something left of this. But this must not lead us to blow the republican discourse out of proportion. This discourse by itself is
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION by Catherine Samary
34 International Viewpoint not enough after the failure of the Maastricht agreement to make possible a new conception of how to build Europe. I have been convinced for a long time that any Europe formed by stuffing it into a monetary corset in a time of recession can only end in collapse
• People's mentalities are usually more conservative than the reality on which they rest. The transformation of society will develop them further. But in the meantime aren't they an obstacie to this transformation?
Some people have presented the events of May 1968 as a procession or a cultural revolution. I tend to think that the clearest result of these events was to break the vicious circle in which revolutionaries had tended until then to enclose the struggle against backward mentalities. Marx put the emphasis on the ambiguity of progress: progress on the one hand, regression on the other. This was true on the issues of opposition to hierarchy, of wages for housework, of consistent ecological thought. When legal trade-union structures became established in workplaces, societal issues fell to a certain extent outside their range of vision. This is a social space that has to be re-conquered.
I am suspicious of great authoritarian utopians, of visions of the heavenly city. The young Marx fought against chimerical utopias. He counterpoised them to what some have called the strategic utopia: thought that pushes forward, exploratory thinking, enthusiasm for new possibilities. From this point of view I think there is an imaginative dimension to any subversive attitude. I think as well of Walter Benjamin's secular messianism. I also keep in mind the refurbished utopia of Ernst Bloch's principle "Hope", which became a point of resistance to the Stalinist bureaucratic order and a riposte to the starvation of the socialist imagination. • In the prologue to Marx L'Intempestif, after having said what Marx's theory is not, you define it as "a daring ferryman of the possible". What do you mean?
I think that the time has come to reawaken in a non-arbitrary way elements that were left unfinished on the drawing board, unexplored by Marx, often pushed aside by the formation of institutionalised Marxisms or established orthodoxies. The situation seems entirely propitious to me for giving new life to questions that are there in Marx's works, even now while the reality of capital is stronger, more global and more planetary than it has ever been. I propose a heterodox reading, which tries to project Marx's thought forward onto current issues raised for us by history and time, conflict or science. I make no claim to reconstitute a doctrine: Marx has suffered enough from doctrinaire thought. I think it is time to free up the elements and material for a critical reconstruction. This requires a new attentiveness to time. This is undoubtedly the point in Marx's work that has been most underestimated. His historical thinking brings not only an attentiveness to time as the beat, rhythm, vibration of a social relationship, but also in addition thinking about the interconnection of non-homogeneous temporalities. Besides the time of theory and that of political urgency, there is also the time of scientific thought and discovery; more generally, the time of process and event. We should listen to these times that join and creak together. Our epoch - as Derrida wrote citing Shakespeare - is truly "out of joint". *