Liam Egan / Writing

In 1977, Louis Althusser noted the "crisis of Marxism" which had come to the fore in the aftermath of fractures between the PRC, the USSR, and communist parties of Europe. In fact, he refers this particular crisis to several preceding "crises of Marxism": the dissolution of the Second International from the conflict over the first World War, the internal conflicts within the USSR with respect to Stalin, etc. We could, of course, cite our own later "crises of Marxism" which Althusser was yet to know: the Marxist seizures of state power in Latin America finding themselves immediately combated by fascists supported by the global imperium, the decline in labor density and labor militancy in the global North, etc.

One notices here that Marxism, it seems, always finds itself in crisis. Both from within and without, it appears to be the structural condition of every Marxist project to be challenged. Althusser suggests that this is because of a set of basic contradictions in the work of Marx, which each historical incarnation of Marxist thought finds itself attempting to address. Dialectically, however, we can realize that this observation is two-sided: on the one hand, each Marxist political project finds the contradictions it must solve in the source material, made up not only of Marx's texts but also the political practices and writings of all those movements which have followed; on the other hand, therefore, each project recognizes in itself the production of future contradictions to be solved by future Marxist projects. In other words, Marxists find themselves always making history, just not in the conditions of their choosing.

It is this basic fact—that every Marxist project finds itself in crisis, asking "what is the Marxism of today?"—in which we might be able to identify something like the fundamental structure of Marxism itself. This core of Marxist thought is not, as Engles argued, to be found in a deterministic relation between economic forms and their content. Nor is it in the pure translatability between one form and the next, or the eventuality of the absolute break. Marx himself may have thought this—that is not for me to decide—but this is not what his philosophy ultimately affords. In looking to the material history of struggle, we are reminded that Marx is not a thinker of determinate negation, but one of the necessary disjunction. We look to the history of collective struggle and see both its changing forms and the ways in which these forms in one and the same moment derive from and are producers of a shared project.

Derrida points to this structure in the coming of the spectre, in our choice to respond to an injunction which we cannot reject. At the same time, what has been and what will be are fused together; the haunting presence of the coming future and the crushing weight of the unavoidable past. If we are always asking, on which the very possibility of an event like this one depends, "what is the Marxism of our time?" it is because such a question is not only introduced by Marx himself but constantly re-introduced and re-negotiated by the structure of Marxist thought. In this gesture we could go beyond Sartre when he called Marxism the "unsurpassable philosophy of our time," and understand it to mean not only that the conditions for its dissolution have not yet been produced, but that its structure demands that the appropriateness to "our time" always be raised.

Of course, I am well aware that I have yet to answer that question. What is the Marxism of our time? I could point towards some empty signifiers: actually existing socialism, the working class, dialectics. I could, in perhaps a less dogmatic fashion, suggest that the Marxism of our time is always that which involves us in or points us towards pragmatic political activities. Are we therefore to think that the dynamic between theory and practice is reducible to "experimentation," whereby politics is subject to the scientific theory of rational, instrumental actualization? Surely if we are to do justice to dialectical thought, we may instead want to identify an underlying ambiguity which exists between, or at the base of, these two poles.

I would suggest that this structural necessity for reinvention and reimagination is the defining feature of Marxism tout court, and we do a disservice to it—I am inclined to say to do it injustice, forget to pay our respects to our collective history of struggle—if we reject this capacity in the ways that are radical and perhaps unsettling. The key insight that Marx takes from Hegel is not the dialectic, but its necessary precursor: that notions, and their corresponding material existence, cannot be radically divorced from their structural situation. Derrida pushes us further in this respect, and through him we understand that this detachment indeed cannot be radical but is nevertheless always present. So Marxism's present is always both itself, its past, its history, as well as its future, its undoing, its making into something which it cannot possibly imagine for itself now.

Perhaps we then understand, by the structure that we have identified, that because Marxism's concrete crises arise from the singular structural crisis which it presupposes and on which it depends, the appropriate response is not to attempt to fix it in place. That would be a rejection of the structure of Marx's thought, of the openness which constitutes its internal differentiation and allows it to function whatsoever. The embrace of this openness would not be to make an injunction to move "beyond Marx" or "beyond Marxism" but to embrace and attempt to move forward in response to the movements of collective political organization which cannot be identified by any "dogmatic" or "ideological" system of Marxist representation. It would be to continually ask: what is, and by is I also mean has been and can be, the Marxism of today?