Success,Needs and Decency: For Marysia Márkus

Success

In the course of her paper ‘Women, Success and Civil Society: Submission to, or Subversion of, the Achievement Principle’, which she wrote before Gyuri’s tragic accident, Marisha notes that it is hard to change the definition of success but that is only by doing so, by challenging the externally prescribed and uniform model of life career, that women can ‘succeed’ (Márkus, 1987: 161–79). This conclusion emerges out of early empirical surveys she completed in Hungary, where she noted the disinterest of many women in the socially prescribed and normatively fixed forms of success (Márkus, 1995: 97). Often women were content to eschew the typical forms of social recognition to attain the personal satisfaction of ‘private success’, to make conscious choices between loss and gain and to establish personally satisfying balances between motherhood and career (Márkus, 1987: 102). Marisha is well aware of both the deprived character of conventional roles for women and of the distortions required for success in modern economic life. She points to the fragility of the connection between social recognition and factual achievement and the ideological nature of the achievement principle, which bases the evaluation of success less on real achievement and more on its symbolic substitutes (Márkus, 1987: 105).

However, the main point of the paper is a concrete contribution to the equality/difference debate raging at that time in feminism. Marisha’s participation wants to defend what she views to be the positive cognitive abilities and emotional patterns of women’s experience that ought not to be lost and to overturn a concept of women’s emancipation that formulated its demands solely in terms of raising women to levels and norms prescribed by the existing status of men. When it comes to the actual content of a woman’s positive cognitive abilities and emotional experience, this is expressed at least in part by their refusal to be defined solely by their work role and by the higher value they typically place on human relations in the workplace (Márkus, 1987: 106).

The task that Marisha designates as changing the definition of success faces numerous obstacles. She doubts that women have become so wise or society so open as assumed by feminists like Betty Friedan. In fact, she maintains that even more is required than a process of gradual enlightenment of individuals and the readjustment of their mutual expectations (Márkus, 1987: 106). While these are needed, they are insufficient. At this point, Marisha turns to the ideal of civil society as the great incubator of social and political change, as the sum total of societal spaces for the negotiation and self-organisation of society in terms of generating solidarity, meaning and consensual co-ordination of interaction (Márkus, 1987: 108). As I will have more to say about this concept in Marisha’s work later on, I shall pass it over for the moment. At this point I only want to draw attention to her conceptual strategy, which is to connect existing needs to those social and political mechanisms of social redefinition and transformation. For Marisha, feminism is a social movement that can help to actualise the potential for such a project of social transformation by adding its weight to those democratic forces trying to mobilise the capacities of contemporary civil society.

Let me say a few things about this brief analysis of success. When Marisha wrote this analysis she could have hardly imagined the difficult choices she would have to make in her life and career in the immediately following years. Of course, a health crisis of a child is something that one experiences almost as a force of nature, and it very often seems as if choice has very little to do with it. However, looked at dispassionately, there are always choices to be made. In her paper Marisha acknowledges that the cost of establishing a personally satisfying balance between family and career can be very high for women. In her own life she has courageously met that cost and struck a balance that was right for her. She and George have cared lovingly for Gyuri with little outside assistance for almost 25 years and, at the same time, she has brought those behavioural and emotional patterns often ascribed to women creatively into her supervisory and co-ordinating roles in the Sociology Department at the University of New South Wales as well as doggedly pursuing an inevitably much reduced, albeit significant, research career. I know she was much loved and very highly regarded by all who worked with her. George and Marisha often spoke in private about the distinction between those supervisors who ‘taught’ and those who ‘sniffed’, the latter being the supervisors who were interested not just in the work of their students but of the whole, perhaps not always completely attractive, person. Marisha, I believe, definitely fell into the second category to the great benefit of all who worked with her. Some might say that she too easily assumed duties and roles typically segmented to women in the contemporary division of labour. However, Marisha has made her academic choices quite consciously refusing the new female option of ‘dressing for success’ as a destruction of the idea of self-realisation and often as the substitution of egotism masked in a veil of institutional and professional attachments. Yet, while she never actively sought her dues in promotion or in external recognition, the reason we are here today and the recognition that she has received via various academic honours both here and abroad is that she still managed, along with very heavy and pressured domestic, teaching and co-ordinating duties, to write a series of research papers and essays that still warrant reading today, in some cases, long after their initial publication.

Needs

One such paper is her ‘Civil Society and the Politicisation of Needs’ (Márkus, 1995). This paper is, in my view, the best analysis of the topic of needs available. This is not a small achievement given the centrality of this question to the Budapest School interpretation of Marxism and the fact that this concept had been addressed several times previously by other members of the Budapest School. The topic of needs was a sort of signature concept for these thinkers from Agnes Heller’s The Theory of Need in Marx (1976) to the joint analysis of really existing socialism in Dictatorship Over Needs (1983) (by Heller, Feher and George Márkus) and informed their critical relation to the politics of substitution. One of the most impressive aspects of Marisha’s approach is the finesse with which she adapts the previous readings of the concept to fit her new social and political environment. In Heller’s early reading the central theoretical position was held by the notion of ‘radical needs’. She maintained that these needs are immanent to capitalist society. However, their satisfaction would signify the transcendence of this society (Heller, 1976). For Heller, the real political potential of radical needs lay in the fact they put in jeopardy the capitalist quantitative structure of needs. This quantitative structure tied to market and exchange values had emancipated the bourgeois individual, leading to a proliferation of new needs for freedom, free time, artistic activity and personal development that could not be satisfied within the existing quantitative structure but pointed beyond it to an entirely new structure of needs. The critical purchase of the concept was the implication that Marx had envisaged a post-revolutionary society in which material and consumer values are increasingly trumped by qualitatively different needs associated with the value of individual autonomy. While Marisha does not dispute Heller’s distinction between quantitative wants and the need for qualitative autonomy, the focus of her own analysis is in the repudiation of all objectivist and paternalist efforts to manipulate and hijack what must ultimately always be a normatively conceived symbolic structure of need interpretation.

From the outset, Marisha understands the critical potential of the concept of needs in respect not just to really existing socialism but also to the welfare states of Western liberal democracies (Márkus, 1995: 162). However, to fully operationalise this potential in the new environment, the project of democratisation had to be reconfigured by linking the self-interpretation of needs, existing civil society and the new social movements which at that time were first registering the attention of other sociologists like Touraine in the West. Marisha believed that the crisis of the welfare state diagnosed by Habermas and others signalled the need for a paradigm change. The previously hegemonic framework of rights and obligations had to give way to a discourse on the interpretation and politicisation of needs (Márkus, 1995: 161). To contest the monopoly of need interpretation exercised by market and welfare bureaucrats, a new structure of social self-organisation based in horizontal dialogue and new structures of solidarity is required (Márkus, 1995: 161). In this configuration the theoretical emphasis drifts away from the question of the existence or otherwise of transcending radical needs to fall on the issue of politicising existing needs, of making them the subject of public discourse and contestation. Thus the division between needs catered for privately and those under the provision of the state must be open to constant revision. This involves not just questioning which needs are to be allocated to each side of the division but the very mode of such a subdivision and hierarchisation of needs (Márkus, 1995: 162). This can only be ensured when mechanisms are in place to allow need interpretation to become a continuous process of self-reflection in which the autonomy of both particular and collective subjects is expressed through their participation.

I do not have space here to rehearse all the details of Marisha’s very rich analysis. Needless to say, all her work is characterised by a strong grasp of the historical contextualisation of the problems with which she deals. While her knowledge of sociological theory is extensive, it is never merely on show. It is designed to advance our understanding of specific issues and see them in the light of historical perspective and political options. She is always making theory work to unveil crucial and/or interesting empirical problems and insights, and one is always aware that her overriding purpose is a critical one, in the very specific sense that she addresses real problems, of inhibited, suppressed or distorted needs that can find their own voice and self-definition only if the democratisation promised by the nexus of social movements, civil society and needs can be brought to function optimally.

Marisha is no utopian. She is conscious of the fact that social inequality does not cease at the portals of need interpretation. While there is no objective account of needs, this does not mean that all are equally able to give voice to their needs. Needs are symbolically interpreted and the opportunities for autonomous need interpretation are not equally distributed (Márkus, 1995: 170). Even the language of need interpretation is differentially distributed. This means that politics must attack this symbolic dimension of social inequality like all others so that the client and the mute are provided with the opportunity and the institutional tools to express their own political identities (Márkus, 1995: 172).

Of course, in hindsight we may well judge that the hopes invested in the new social movements were overblown. Talk of a new kind of political subject resting on the heterogeneity of such groups, lacking common economic, class or status attributes, perhaps exaggerated the potential of these movements as bearers of pluralism and a new democratic paradigm. However, a modicum of optimism is a professional deformation of those who still steadfastly affirm this open-ended process of democratic self-reimagining as the vehicle of their hopes (Márkus, 1995: 173). To my mind, Marisha’s model of the interplay between contemporary needs, social dynamism, civil society and democratic dialogue and debate remains at the centre of a contemporary progressive politics, whatever our reservations. This level of insight and the clarity with which it is theorised in all its complexity is an uncommon achievement.

Decency

The essay ‘Decent Society and/or Civil Society’, published several years later, might be regarded as a sort of companion piece (Márkus, 2001). This time a reflection on post-emancipation Eastern Europe initiates her train of thought. She recalls that the original project for an active civil society that reached its political crescendo in the 1980s was in part carried by a sense of moral renewal in which the values of solidarity, plurality, communication and participation helped give shape to a new understanding of the importance of civil society (Márkus, 2001: 1016). However, in the unheroic times of the post-liberation, with the waning of revolutionary energies, Eastern European politics suffered from a vacuum at the level of mechanisms of social integration (Márkus, 2001: 1017). If a modern civil society is to work optimally, what is required is effective co-operation amongst a plurality of interests. Civil society must not be merely a multiplicity of independent associations, there must also exist effective mechanisms of mediation between these plural interests (Márkus, 2001: 1020). Marisha provides us with a compelling democratic vision of the essence of civil society. This is the sustained attempt, independent of the state, by a people to be in charge of shaping their own life conditions and influencing actually and visibly the relevant decisions of public bodies and institutions (Márkus, 2001: 1014). However, she realises that even in its ideal instantiation, the civil dimension of civil society, while a vital condition of any flourishing civil society insofar as it involves the recognition of basic and inalienable rights, is still too detached and impersonal to generate a real interest in others. She concludes that civility itself is a necessary but insufficient ingredient to ensure a flourishing civil society (Márkus, 2001: 1021). It provides the basic framework of a ‘society of strangers’ but does not supply the interest and openness that transforms contracts into trust and commitment.

At this point Marisha turns to Avishai Margalit’s concept of decency as inspiration for the secret additive that will bring fully to life the potentialities of modern civil society. Thus, for her, civil and decent societies are not synonymous but are complementary. The latter is a normative concept that invokes a disposition both for institutions and in interpersonal relations of striving with a concern for the dignity of each person and a commitment to promoting the ability of all members of society to experience a dignified and meaningful life (Márkus, 2001: 1021). Marisha also underscores the point that such a society, contra contemporaries like Giorgio Agamben, is likely to extend its possibilities to non-members as well (Márkus, 2001: 1022). If a contemporary civil society is to go beyond mere tolerance of each other, this moral striving on the part of a significant portion of the population belongs to the conditions of a flourishing civil society (Márkus, 2001: 1022). Of course, the requirements of decency are ostensibly selfless, and this may explain why contemporary civil society is in less than a flourishing condition. But Marisha realises only too well that she is offering a high normative standard. For her, the virtue of this concept is that it is vague and open in the positive sense (Márkus, 2001: 1023). It is committed to no particular concrete content and spurs the social imagination. Because the positive definition of a society that avoids humiliation of individuals can be filled out in a variety of ways, its emptiness invites continuous reconstruction, and this is especially meaningful in a modern dynamic society where the idea of minimal decency is becoming increasingly differentiated but not invalidated (Márkus, 2001: 1024).

It seems that Marisha’s concept of dignity and the moral disposition of striving to acknowledge the dignity of every human being and the commitment for each to have a meaningful life is a fitting point at which to end my brief introduction to the lasting significance of a few of her key essays. I have touched on some of the key concerns and values that are not only articulated in her work but have also been lived in a very successful life. I don’t want to imply that Marisha is some kind of saint; she is far more interesting than that. Those of us who know her well are aware that her great vivacity is anchored in a vitality for life – Arendt might have said amour mundi – but also a love of fun, humour and even a childlike egoism that only adds to her charm. However, her work and her life were very much formed in ‘dark times’, and this has imbued her perspective with a high moral and political seriousness. Her success emanates with the decency to which she aspires and with a deep commitment to the needs of others. Would we not all like to achieve such a success!