Bolívar Echeverría on Márkus

As you know, György Márkus is one of the main disciples of Georg Lukács. ¹ In that respect he is identified, from the very start, by something like a species of classicism, because if there is truly an outstanding figure within Marxist theory in the 20th century it is that of Georg Lukács. György Márkus, with some of his colleagues, formed what was called the ‘Budapest School’, a school which attempted to follow, criticize, and actualize his approach. This school tried to maintain, within the area of the ideological influence of the Soviet Empire, the possibility of a critical Marxism, including a Marxism capable of self-criticism and capable of developing and getting involved in the discussion with other theoretical positions of the 20th century. But Márkus, together with the other members of the Budapest School, suffered the repression of the Hungarian state, dependent on the Soviet state. He was driven to such extremes of poverty that he had no alternative but to migrate to Australia. ² Since then he has worked in Sydney. A curious situation, as he has been working on theories discussed in the centre of Europe from the remotest place, Australia.

As we know, György Márkus is author of many very important books, e.g. Marxism and Anthropology. He has analysed the theory of consciousness in the young Marx, culture and modernity, dictatorship of capital over needs, etc. My discussion will focus on his chapter ‘On the Possibility of Critical Theory’.

To begin with, the article is very well presented by Julio Boltvinik, who is a disciple ³ and admirer of György Márkus, in an earlier commentary which synthesizes previous chapters of his book Language and Production. In this way the reader can approach ‘On the Possibility of Critical Theory’ with the knowledge of the theoretical framework in which the argument of the article is conceived.

The article refers principally to what we might call the foundations of a certain type of theory, to a certain type of scientificity; we might even say to the foundation of critical scientificity. It searches for the foundation of a critical-theory attitude and for the development of critical theory. For the possibilities of a critical science.

In this context, Márkus makes reference to what he calls two paradigms: the paradigm of communication and the paradigm of production. Two opposite perspectives but which might become complementary for the purpose of deciphering social behaviour and also, therefore, historical tendencies. One paradigm is that of communication, i.e. the one that perceives the human world as a niche whose essence is the capacity of human beings to communicate and build something like a ‘communicative community’, to speak in terms of Jürgen Habermas. The other paradigm, György Márkus tells us, is the paradigm of production, which is properly the paradigm of Marx: to interpret and consider all human phenomena as phenomena which find their key in the relation of the social subject with nature to obtain from it certain goods which are indispensable for his/her subsistence, i.e. in the process of work or production properly. György Márkus says that although these two paradigms do not exclude each other, they are nevertheless so completely different that the attempts made so far to combine them, trying to build a paradigm which integrates them, have not been fruitful, including that of Jürgen Habermas.

What he posits is that the paradigm of production as developed in the critical discourse of Marx is a paradigm that is not sufficient to grasp the whole set of social and historical phenomena of our time and that it is therefore necessary to radically reformulate it even in a radical manner. His proposal is to radicalize this approach by making production the key to human reality. For this, the important thing, he maintains, is to go back to the central bent of Marx’s argument in his critical discourse as discourse of production which, according to Márkus, would be precisely the dialectics of productive forces and relations of production or, stated in other terms, the theory of progress.

In fact, György Márkus tells us, Marx’s critical theory is a theory of progress set out from a very similar perspective to that of the natural sciences. The dialectics of productive forces and relations of production would be like a scientific description of an organic process in which a certain mass, at the beginning formless, which would be the productive forces, proceeds by giving itself successive shells, like a crustacean, which would become the relations of production. At the beginning these help it to grow, but later they become a hindrance to growth, and to that extent would be disposed of, one after the other. In this way, then, there would be something like a substratum of human essence which would be permanently attempting to grow and progress, and for that, relations of production would be generated. The productive forces would create their own relations of production which, at a certain point, after being motivators and promoters of their growth, would become hindrances and would have to be disposed of. Human history would then be the history which combines these two axes: the diachronic and the synchronic, and in which what effectively exists is this human substance, with its accumulative self-perfecting trend to progress, and above it a succession of drafts, schemes and proposals for the organization of these productive forces, which would be the relations of production. In this sense, the theory of Marx would be a scientific theory very similar to the natural sciences and would have as its fundamental tenet this notion of progress of the human essence as such.

Now then, what György Márkus maintains is that Marx’s critical theory implies another (and different) level of theoretical thought in which the notion of progress would be posited in a different way. He says, I quote:

the theory of human progress is not the positive science of history, it only makes sense as part of the historical practical effort to provide human history with a progressive meaning; in other words, to create conditions under which the individuals, all individuals, can effectively and equally participate, in the decisions which determine how to shape the social-institutional framework of their lives to live better according to their own values and needs. ⁴

This conception of progress is not, in Márkus’s discourse, the verification of an empirical fact. It is not that progress exists, but that it is precisely the critical perspective that constructs, or tries to construct, the coherence of the empirical data around the notion of progress; that is to say, in viewing this whole process, it is critical theory’s notion of progress which organizes the researcher’s available data. It is then the critical discourse which projects this idea of progress: the idea that everything effectively occurs to give a sense of perfectioning to the human essence.

This perspective implies, György Márkus maintains, a value position. Critical theory is a value-loaded or evaluative theory, and this value choice can in the end only be justified in practice, by the realization of its interpretation of reality in the progress of human beings. For György Márkus there are no historical guarantees either of the success or of the failure of this enterprise. It can’t be said a priori, in theory, that the association of free producers, the ‘good society’, will end up prevailing over its opposite, the society of one-dimensional individuals. All of this is something that is not in the data, which is not a result of the scientific analysis of the facts, but that derives from an elaboration of those facts and the projection of the perspective of critical discourse.

This is an approach by György Márkus with which we can agree: the point for critical discourse is not beginning with positive discourse, be it positivist or not, a discourse which considers only the facts that come from the empirical order. Rather, it shapes a theory which works from the very beginning with those facts and gives them a scientific interpretation in reference to what could be called the perspective of human emancipation.

Despite the fact that I coincide completely with this approach by György Márkus, there is something in it which, nevertheless, to me seems problematic when he speaks of the fate of this theory in Marx’s mature work. According to his approach, in the Marx of Capital we find something like a theoretical regression. In it Marx behaves as if he were a scientist who reads in the empirical reality the meaning (sense) of history and of the facts themselves. To that extent he endangers the critical totalizing perspective which was especially present in the young Marx.

This is why, for György Márkus, the radicalization of the paradigm of production implies a return to the young Marx. A return to the Marx of the Manuscripts of 1844. To the Marx before the turn he articulated in The German Ideology. Márkus attempts – and this is his radical proposal – to ground the validity of the critical discourse by connecting it, starting from Marxist theory, with what could be called, he says, the theoretical expression of this becoming perspective, as the experienced reality of certain radical needs. In a certain way he attempts to create a new foundation for critical discourse by going back to the individual, as the core of the perspective of the need of change at the level of the concrete experience of the need for revolution.

The point on which I would like to insist is on what it seems to me is criticizable in Márkus’s interpretation of Capital. It is an interpretation that in my view leaves aside what perhaps constitutes the most important momentum in Marx’s argumentation in that work. Márkus does not acknowledge the potentiality of the concept of alienation which is present in the discourse of Marx in Capital. Where this outward appearance of scientificity, this attempt to resemble Darwin – which undoubtedly is present in Marx – is, in my view, precisely that: an indispensable outward appearance, something which is necessary but not sufficient. I consider that what is here at stake is that to which Walter Benjamin referred to regarding the capacity of historical materialism to defeat the opponent in discussions about historical human realities. Historical materialism, according to Benjamin, always has right on its side, but why? The answer he provides is in his famous allegory of the automatic chess player. He says that historical materialism is like that attractive doll which defeats any opponent in chess, but which is handled by a midget hidden below the chessboard. In other words, the virtue of historical materialism does not lie in its enlightened appearance, in its scientific form, in the capacity to confront on equal terms bourgeois scientists, of writing great treatises, of exhibiting a fabulous quantity of references, documenting step by step with empirical data every statement made, which is exactly the scientific appearance of Marx’s Capital. Its virtue lies elsewhere: in the theory of alienation. The theory of alienation is not presented in enlightened scientific terms. It is like the hunchbacked midget in the allegory of Walter Benjamin, who from his hiding place below the chessboard converts the doll, whom he moves secretly, into an invincible player. Alienation theory is precisely the theory that founds the validity of Marx’s critical discourse, the validity of historical materialism. In that sense, it seems to me that Márkus’s interpretation of Capital does not grasp the core of Marx’s argumentation.

For Márkus, the core of Marx’s argumentation in Capital lies in the concept of contradiction between modern productive forces, technified or new, and antiquated, capitalist, relations of production. Nevertheless, if one pauses in a more meticulous and problematizing reading of Marx’s text, one will find that the core concept of contradiction is not found in the relation between modern productive forces and capitalist relations of production, but rather in the prevailing relation between the ‘natural form of social reproduction’ and the ‘value form’ of that same reproduction. Stated in another way, the core concept of contradiction is the one referred to as the contradiction between use-value and value. The basic hypothesis of the whole of Marx’s argumentation in Capital, to which he refers constantly, is the one that proposes a description of the process of capitalist production as consisting of the ‘contradictory unity of the labour process, in its natural form, and the process of valorisation’, a process in which the first is actualized only in abstract terms, in a quantitavist and productivist manner. This is the great, profound contradiction of capitalism and not the one posited by Márkus.

This contradiction is very important for critical discourse because it shows that human existence in its totality in the society of capitalist modernity is an existence which is itself submitted to a double ‘logic’, the logic of use-value – qualitative or social-natural – and the logic of valorization of value. However, these logics not only function in these two contradictory senses, but one of them, the sense of valorization, permanently defeats the natural or use-value sense. According to Marx, ‘A process of subsumption of the process of labour under the process of valorisation takes place’. This is the key, the foundation, of all social modern existence, which is penetrated by this contradiction present in the individual and collective experience of human beings.

The extremity of this subsumption process of the social-natural under the purely economic-capitalist is described precisely by the concept of alienation because this concept refers to a state or process in which the process of valorization achieves the subsumption of the human subject. That is, the human quality of being a subject is absorbed by capital itself, and the human being becomes a spectator of a subject role which belongs to him in principle, but that is suspended in him and substituted and played by capital: capital, the substitute subject, is the real god of capitalist modernity, which imposes its will as a dictator. And the human being – which in principle could reactivate the exercise of his sovereignty or political self-reliance – is found, given the violent usurpation of his political capacity, obeying the stipulations of this great subject. In this sense, then, the ‘contradiction between the natural form and the value form’ is a contradiction which is present in all and each of all moments of the existence of capitalist modernity. It is not necessary, as György Márkus states, to search for those peculiar individual experiences in which the contradiction he posits between productive forces and social relations would be present.

This is my brief critique of this decisive point in Márkus’s work on the possibility of a critical theory. I think that this possibility of dialogue among Marxists without submission to an authority which will determine which of the two has the right on his side is justly something that is opened up by journals like Desacatos. This is why it is for me a motive of great satisfaction to participate in this exchange.