jeffrey c.

isaac

INTELLECTUALS, MARXISM

AND POLITICS

I
read with great interest Alex Callinicos’s critique of
Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu in NLR 236. It is a provoc-
ative essay whose ambition and logic epitomizes what is wrong,
and what is right, with a certain kind of ‘Marxist’ critique. Most of
what is wrong with it stems from its reductionism and stubborn refusal
to interrogate canonical categories. Callinicos does not want to learn
from his interlocutors, because he already knows the truth; so his essay
is predictable—never an intellectual virtue. On the other hand, armed
with his particular truth, Callinicos is incisive and relentless in a cri-
tique that rightly identifies the limits of his interlocutors’ arguments,
but unfortunately stops short before his own.

Callinicos’s critique can be summarized as follows: Giddens is a

Weberian social theorist who has lost his critical edge and become an
ideologist of the Clinton/Blair Third Way. Bourdieu is an iconoclastic
social theorist, in the mould of Durkheim, who has moved politically
to the left, but remains trapped in a bourgeois discourse of the ‘univer-
sal intellectual’ and social democratic reform. Both theorists fall short
of standard Marxist analysis of the contradictions of capitalism in the
epoch of post-Fordism and flexible accumulation. Giddens attracts most
hostility. The Third Way, ‘one of the worst books by a leading social theo-
rist’, offers a complacent vision of globalization. Bourdieu is presented
as the antithesis of Giddens, a crusader like Noam Chomsky who takes
the depredations of capitalism seriously and struggles against them in
a spirit of Sartrean engagement. But, alas, Bourdieu is limited by his
failure to be a Marxist and thus, in good Hegelian fashion, needs to

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be aufgehoben. Giddens’s acceptance of the imperatives of capitalism,
and Bourdieu’s spirited and well-meaning but merely social democratic
opposition to them, find their resolution at a higher level in a vaguely
defined Marxism. Indeed, by the end of Callinicos’s essay the apparent
choice between these three alternatives is dialectically reduced to two,
as Bourdieu’s ineffectual social democracy is compelled by the force of
argument to opt between the others. The first path, writes Callinicos, is
to ‘adapt to the existing order, seeking marginal improvements inflated
by self-deceiving rhetoric. Such, essentially, is the course adopted by
Giddens. Alternatively, one can seek to identify and to strengthen the
forces capable of challenging the structures of capitalist domination.
Bourdieu seems to be groping towards this second option. To do so
effectively will require that he seriously engages with the revolutionary
Marxist tradition.’ Despite the qualifications—what do ‘effectively’ and
‘seriously’ mean?—Callinicos leaves no doubt that Bourdieu can rise to
the level of authentic critique only by embracing some of the central
claims of revolutionary Marxism.

I asserted earlier that Callinicos has no desire to learn from his inter-
locutors. His attitude is unfortunate, and I have no wish to be similarly
dismissive of Callinicos’s own argument. In a spirit of serious intel-
lectual engagement, then, having reduced this argument to its basic
dialectical logic—to rational kernel—I should say that Callinicos presents
a compelling critique of both Giddens and Bourdieu from a Marxist per-
spective. He effectively demonstrates that neither Giddens nor Bourdieu
has a systematic theory of the structures of capitalism, or a strategy capa-
ble of breaking with the powerful imperatives of capital accumulation
that constrain even the best-intentioned government, as the fate of Oskar
Lafontaine illustrates. Callinicos rightly argues that neither writer raises
deep questions about ‘the viability of the nation-state in an era of globali-
zation,’ nor addresses ‘the structural limits to the state’s responsiveness
to pressures from below.’ These criticisms come down to the following
unimpeachable point: capitalist societies produce insecurity and inequal-
ity, and the distribution of power in these societies—structured by both
the state and social relations—tends to make it exceedingly difficult to
challenge insecurity and inequality, thereby in effect reproducing them.

While both Giddens and Bourdieu have no answer for this, Callinicos
prefers the latter because he ‘sets himself in frontal opposition’—a rather
unGramscian stance—to the effects of capitalism. By comparison with

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Giddens, in his eyes Bourdieu at least has the virtue of being militantly,
or moralistically, anti-capitalist. But here the key question is this: what
does it really mean at the dawn of the twenty-first century to be ‘anti-
capitalist?’ Beyond this, what does it mean to be a ‘revolutionary Marxist’
or, in Callinicos’s phrase, to adopt ‘Gramsci’s conception of the revolu-
tionary socialist party as the organic intellectual of the working class?’
What is the practical point of such avowals—what forces of liberating or
even merely remedial transformation do they disclose within the heart
of the present?

The need for pragmatism

I believe they amount to very little. Certain Marxian categories of

analysis—‘flexible accumulation’, ‘post-Fordism’—are indispensible to
intelligent social criticism, although many non-Marxist writers make
good use of them as well (for example Richard Sennett in his Corrosion of
Character). But while Marxism continues to offer insights into features
of capital accumulation, it has lost its charm as a revolutionary praxis—
that is, as an immanent critique of capitalism that points towards its
transcendence by a ‘higher’ form of society. This is the tragic side of the
relationship between theory and practice in Marxism. It has lost whatever
‘organic’ connection it once had to significant parties and movements.
Most importantly of all, naïve confidence in a future beyond commod-
ity production, surplus value, exploitation and alienation is no longer
possible. As a slogan or expression of rancorous hostility towards capi-
talism, and a way of identifying with a historical tradition that had its
good—as well as its evil—dimensions, ‘revolutionary Marxism’ has a
point. But as a practical position, it has become pointless. This is demon-
strable in the most intelligent and programmatic essays published in
New Left Review itself, which develop and endorse—as in the case of
Robin Blackburn’s fascinating study of pension funds—what can only be
described as practical experiments within the admittedly unethical and
unsatisfying framework of capitalism. Of course these arguments can be
chalked up to strategic compromises on the path toward ‘revolutionary
transformation’. But this would be no more than wishful thinking, for
there no longer exists a compelling vision of what such a journey would
be like or what would be in store for us at the end of it. Why? Part of
the reason lies in political and economic changes; part in the emergence
of sources of social division not reducible to class; and part lies in what
Jurgen Habermas has called a learning process. The history of violence

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in the twentieth century—not least the Communist terror justified by
appeals to ‘necessity’ and ‘progress’ that François Furet has analysed
so well in The Passing of an Illusion—has made many, including on the
left, suspicious of appeals to ‘revolution’ of any sort. The demise of the
Marxist vision has many causes. But it is now an accomplished fact.

This brings me back to Giddens. Callinicos presents a powerful critique.

Giddens is too upbeat about the Third Way. He has too little to say
about the obstacles in the real world to the values he espouses, about
the deplorable conditions that the Third Way does not and cannot seek
to eliminate. Perhaps he has offered too much intellectual credibility
to the two-faced policies of Blair and Clinton. These criticisms are apt.
But there is nonetheless a truth in Giddens’s analysis that is lacking in
both Bourdieu’s moralizing opposition to globalization and Callinicos’s
more sophisticated, systematic, yet at the same time religious—indeed
almost Kierkegaardian—critique of capitalism. Giddens declares that
‘no one has any alternatives to capitalism’. Now we might not like this,
but Giddens is alas correct. Nothing that Callinicos says refutes him. To
say this is not to regard contemporary capitalism as a ‘trans-historical
feature of human existence’ or ‘second nature’. It is simply to remark
that given the history that we have inherited and the world that human
beings have created, there exists no credible wholesale alternative to cap-
italism. The same could be said of water purification, modern medicine,
electronic communication, industrial technology with all of its wastes
and hazards, and also civil liberties and representative government of
some sort. These are all historical achievements, products of human
agency we cannot imagine transcending. We could of course attempt,
by force—because few who have experienced these things would simply
assent—to abolish all of these. But it is hard to conceive what could plau-
sibly be held up as radically different but also better, and it is harder still
to imagine that the effort to abolish such modern arrangements would
produce anything but great misery.

Capitalism, of course, differs from medicine or civil liberties. For in

spite of the consumer advantages it makes available to some—including
a not inconsiderable number of inhabitants of advanced industrial socie-
ties, and no doubt many keen readers of New Left Review—it is a system
of thoroughgoing, global inequality. As such it is an evil. But there exists
neither a credible idea of what might replace it nor a substantial por-
tion of humankind committed to any ‘universal’ alternative to it. That

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is why what Callinicos pejoratively describes as Giddens’s ‘coming to
terms with capitalism’ is necessary. Far from being an act of betrayal
or intellectual cowardice, such a ‘coming to terms’ is the only mature
and serious course open to us. To come to terms with the world does
not mean to accept it as it is, but to approach it with a realistic sense
of what is ethically and politically possible. Perhaps we could imagine
completely different and better worlds. I regularly encourage my under-
graduate students to do this. Much of the literary genre of science fiction
is based on such imagining. But a serious, responsible critique that
seeks to make this awful, wonderful and tragic earth a better place, must
take its bearings from the world that exists. This, after all, was always
what Marxism claimed as its principal virtue, though as far back as
Karl Korsch critical Marxists themselves began to see that Marxism was
less prescient, more partial and constrained by history, than its most
fervent adherents were willing to admit. It is precisely in the name of
realism and ‘materialism’ that one must take very seriously the critique
of Marxism that Giddens, and many others, have developed. The tragedy
of Marxism is that while it retains theoretical insight it lacks ethical cred-
ibility and historical power.

This does not mean that all the details of Giddens’s argument are cor-
rect. To my own mind some are more persuasive than others. But it does
mean that Giddens’s effort to come to terms with capitalism is the only
mature option. Callinicos describes Giddens’s work as ‘a de-ideologiza-
tion of politics, as the latter is reduced to problem-solving.’ He clearly
thinks this a step back, but I believe it is a step forward. I am no defender
of Richard Rorty’s particular version of it, but the spirit we need is prag-
matic—a democratic pragmatism, rooted in the best of Marx, Dewey and
others, which abjures grand labels and seeks to use reason and persua-
sion to make the world a better place. This is problem solving. Over
one hundred and fifty years ago Marx proclaimed that communism was
the ‘riddle of history solved’. For Marx communism—what later came
to be called ‘revolutionary Marxism’—promised the disappearance of
social conflicts and solution of the core problems of human existence.
We know now that this was an impossible dream. But to solve some
of our problems, to limit some of the most egregious inequalities and
indignities that surround us—that is both possible and necessary. Yet
the means of doing so are obscure, and the political will is weak. Here
lies the challenge for a democratic politics today.

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