How Not to Go Beyond Marx: A Reply to Worrell and Krier

The Main Argument

Worrell/Krier’s ammunition for their attack on Marx is obtained from a number of major theorists. We may begin with Hegel.

As Worrell and Krier note, there is a sense in which the category ‘disjunctive syllogism’ is the culmination of Hegel’s Logic. While it is not the final category of the book, it does provide the ultimate subjective framework for comprehending the objective world. Or, rather, for Hegel, systems of syllogisms are not merely modes of subjective thinking but rather dimensions of the objective world in the sense that moments of universality, particularity, and singularity are combined in actuality, with each mediating the other two within open-ended complex wholes. What is actual is not unified by a universal somehow ‘outside’ it in some transcendental space beyond. Universality exists solely within a complex totality in a disjunctive series of particular forms. Similarly, singular elements do not exist on their own. They are what they are only through the mediation of particular forms that are themselves mediated within a higher-order dynamic unity. For Hegel, these abstract logical determinations can be discerned in the complex dynamic whole that is a modern society. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right examines modern society as a unity forged through the systematic interconnections of particular institutions and associations. Its individual members are social individuals, whose identity is forged through the mediation of those particular institutions and associations.

Durkheim translates Hegel’s German Idealist jargon into sociological terminology. But the basic lesson is the same: social life requires institutional determinations and mediations. If they are absent individuals drift unmoored, soon beset by social pathologies. Durkheim’s great student Mauss provides deep anthropological evidence for this thesis. From the dawn of human existence social life has been integrated through gift exchange of objects with a sacred aura, a ‘collective effervescence’ Worrell and Krier seem to take as a form of Hegel’s universal spirit. Lacan employs a quite different vocabulary, yet expresses the same central point. In every society there must be a ‘Big Other’ that symbolically castrates individuals (that is, prevents them from living lives of utter amorphousness), while in return granting them a symbolic penis (that is, a particular identity within the symbolic order).

Whatever other differences these theorists may have, on the essential matter here they agree: no society can ever attempt to abolish particular determinations and mediations without horrific consequences. There cannot be a social world consisting of nothing more than fleeting associations among individuals. Any attempt to create such a world will leave people wallowing in frivolity, since a serious life requires profound identification with the determinations defining a particular place in society. Sooner rather than later massive social pathologies will invariably erupt.

Marx, Worrell and Krier assert, utterly failed to comprehend any of this. He called for a post-capitalist society where individuals lack mediation though particular institutions and universal norms, and are therefore prone to the social pathologies of unmoored existence, blind to the social necessity of sacred gift exchange, and lost in the hopeless fantasy of a symbolic order that does not require symbolic castration. Worrell and Krier believe that Marx felt that if we just overthrew the evil devils (capitalists) we would be able to live ‘naturally’, drifting through an indeterminate series of structureless dyadic encounters. This perspective, Worrell and Krier insist, is fatally flawed for the simple reason that it is impossible. And it is dangerous for the simple reason that ‘Such evacuation of mediating “substances” results in either frivolity or pragmatic barbarism’. Any attempt to follow the path Marx points to in his ‘combination of primitivism and spontaneous (anomic) infantilism’ is bound to end in catastrophe. Given the utter impossibility of living the sort of amorphous lives Marx proposes, any attempt at constructing a society fostering such lives will lead to immense frustration and conflict (‘paranoid delusions’ and ‘nemeses’). Sooner or later the desperate search for a way out will allow some authoritarian figure to impose order with the acclamation of a critical mass of the populace. Worrell and Krier can be added to the list of those claiming that terror and totalitarianism are tied to the very logic of Marx’s theory: ‘We are struck with this mirror of terror even within a Marxist model of communism because Marx is hysterically averse to universal mediations’. Again, ‘Marx’s communist universal is just a cardboard cutout circulating an abyss’ and ‘a field of morbid enjoyments … a yawning abyss of anxious and mutilated psyches setting up active and passive defenses; deprived of an objective ground for existence, rational reflection, and regulation, and twisted by countervailing currents of socially pathological sentiments and doomed to neurotic or psychotic forms of hyper-subjectivism … crazy subjects willing the abyss itself’.

The first thing that should be noted is the a priori implausibility of the reading of Marx underlying this rhetorical bombast. Prior to Marx almost all political philosophers and classical political economists appealed to ‘nature’, whether an imagined ‘state of nature’ prior to the rise of governments (Hobbes and Locke), a natural drive to seek happiness and avoid pain (utilitarians), the rationality distinguishing human nature from that of other creatures (Kant), or the natural propensity to truck and barter (Adam Smith). They then concluded that there was a ‘natural’ way for social life to be. Marx vehemently and unequivocally rejected that thesis, asserting in effect that evolutionary biology is compatible with a wide range of forms of social organization. Marx devoted the greater portion of his life to comprehending the particular social forms of capital in their historical specificity. He shows how the dominant social practices and tendencies of modern societies differ profoundly from those of Ancient Greece, Medieval Europe, and so on, precisely because the particular determinations of modern capitalism are so different from those of previous eras. Marx is, in brief, the great theorist of social forms.

It is possible, of course, that Marx somehow just forgot about social forms when he considered society beyond capitalism, or that he somehow convinced himself that a society beyond capitalism could dispense with them and let spontaneous interactions occur ‘naturally’ without the mediations and determinations of specific social forms. The more deeply one understands the absolutely central importance of social forms in Marx’s thought, however, the more unlikely either possibility seems. ³

This consideration, of course, is not conclusive. Worrell and Krier present evidence for their case, and it must be assessed. They cite three key texts as evidence. One passage is the footnote in Capital 1 where Marx discusses how Peter’s identity rests upon Paul’s recognition of it. This text, they think, proves conclusively that Marx constructed his social theory on the assumption that social life can be reduced to a series of dyadic relationships, as opposed to the social mediations beyond direct face-to-face encounters correctly stressed in different ways by Hegel, Durkheim, Mauss, and Lacan. A second key passage, also introduced as evidence numerous times, comes from The German Ideology, where Marx (in)famously describes a post-capitalist future where I can hunt in the morning, fish in the evening, and be a critical theorist in the evening, ‘just as I have a mind to’. They take this call for a plurality of activities as conclusive proof that Marx failed to recognize how social reproduction demands social differentiation of vocations, and that a non-pathological social identity demands having a place within that differentiation. Finally, Worrell and Krier quote a long passage where Marx quite explicitly rejects Hegel’s notion of mediation. One ‘smoking gun’ is usually sufficient to establish guilt; Worrell and Krier believe they have at least three.

When these passages are considered on their own, the Worrell/Krier readings do not appear unreasonable. But more charitable readings of them are possible, and if the passages are placed in their proper contexts the more charitable readings emerge as far better readings ‘all things considered’. After examining these passages I shall then turn to a more positive case for an alternative judgement of Marx’s position.

The Peter and Paul Footnote

It is much easier to explain what went wrong with the Worrell/Krier reading of the Peter/Paul passage than it is to explain why it went so wrong. The meaning of the footnote is not in dispute: Peter’s social identity is not a property he possesses in himself, so to speak. It is a social property he comes to have only in so far as it is recognized by Paul. Worrell/Krier correctly note the parallel here with what Marx termed the accidental [‘simple’] form of value, where the value of some commodity x is not a property that can actualize in itself, so to speak. The value of a given commodity is a ‘supersensuous’ social property that can only come to actuality when it is ‘recognized’ by some other commodity b for which it is exchanged. So far so good. But for some reason Worrell and Krier stop here, refusing to draw the full implications of the analogy they themselves introduced.

Marx considers the accidental form of value is the most simple and most abstract manner of comprehending the form of value. But for that very reason he also insists it is an inadequate form. Value is generalized exchangeability, an emergent property of products within generalized commodity exchange. As such, value cannot be adequately represented in any other particular commodity, or even in an indefinitely extended series of other particular commodities. Value can only adequately appear in something which is a universal equivalent, money. Money is a macro-level social form, the fetishized form in which the sociality uniting the community as a whole appears. Volume 1 of Capital then goes on to develop a macro-monetary theory explaining the sum total of surplus value produced in the economy as a whole in terms of the macro-level relationship between capital as a class and wage labor as a class (Moseley, 2015). ⁴

A more charitable, and better, reading of Marx’s footnote would incorporate the following elements:

Worrell and Krier assert that the Peter/Paul footnote expresses Marx’s general model of society only because they ignore its entire context (the macro-level theory of Volume 1), as well as the implications of the parallel they themselves draw between the footnote and the accidental form of value. The point of the footnote is simply to affirm that no Peter can play a social role unless there is a Paul to recognize that the role is being played, a truism only the crassest methodological individualist would deny. By no means does it imply that Marx is committed to the general ontological claim that society is reducible to an aggregate of dyadic relationships.

The German Ideology Passage

Turning to the ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon’ text from the The German Ideology, a charitable reading would keep the general historical context in which Marx was writing in the front of our minds. The techniques for the systematic disciplining of bodies on a massive scale developed in the capitalist slave plantations of the early modern world were rapidly being transferred to the factories of Europe. A massive appropriation of workers’ time was essential to this project, approaching the limit point where the only time workers could claim as their ‘own’ was a regimented time for sleep – and even that time was compressed with the diffusion of new world stimulants like coffee and sugar. As a result of being forced to sell labor power to survive living labor now belonged to capital, incorporated as a moment in capital’s relentless process of self-valorization. Waking time was capital’s time.

More space is devoted in the first volume of Capital to the centuries-long struggle to win some time back from capital than to any other single topic. The lessons to be learned could not be more sobering. Struggles to reclaim time can be successful in some circumstances. But even when they are eventually victorious, capital’s claim on our time remains relentless and totalizing. More time appears to be at workers’ disposal. Yet reductions in the work day are met with new technologies and forms of social organization intensifying the labor process, requiring a great proportion of ‘their’ time to be spent recovering from the physical and psychological stress of the workplace. ⁵ It should still be counted as capital’s time. And whenever the balance of power between capital and labor shifts to the former’s advantage, restrictions on the limits of the time capital can appropriate tend to be eased. These considerations are as relevant in our age of ‘flexible’ and ‘precarious’ work as they were in Marx’s day (Smith, 2000). And there are a host of new ways human time today is appropriated by capital: consider the time of extensive commutes to workplaces, the time spent working for employers outside the workplace, the time spent on computer networks providing information about ourselves that the most profitable corporations of our day appropriate as a ‘free gift’ to monetarize, the time spent in commodified leisure in the ever-expanding ‘society of the spectacle’, and so on (Crary, 2014; Krier and Swart, 2014).

Few prominent normative social theorists have even noted the crucial distinction between human time and capital time, let along granted it the importance it deserves. Marx, in contrast, put it at the absolute center of his writings; for Marx all politics is ultimately the politics of time. In my view this is a tremendous contribution to social theory, and Marx’s call for a society where we can freely choose to engage in a multiplicity of endeavors should be unequivocally endorsed. Worrell and Krier, however, dismiss Marx’s proposal as an infantile fantasy, invoking Weber’s hymns of praise to the sanctity of a calling, without which supposedly nothing of value can be accomplished and no one can avoid psychosis.

Marx does indeed call the ideal of lives devoted to a calling into question. It should be called into question. Worrell and Krier write as if nothing has changed in the five hundred years since the heyday of the Protestant Ethic. But the ‘general intellect’ has greatly developed in the interim (Marx, 1987 [1939]: 92). The collective intelligence and creativity expressed in formal scientific and technological theories and embodied in machinery and machine systems, along with the formal and informal knowledge of working men and women, have led to great productivity gains. The ‘grow or die’ imperative of capitalism means that productivity gains are used to increase of output while combining unemployment for some with overwork for others. Extensive material deprivation and environmental catastrophe are the foregone conclusions. But those results are socially determined rather than technologically determined. Productivity advances could be used to overcome material deprivation while simultaneously lowering the time that must be spent in formal workplaces, freeing us for greater time for relationships with family and friends, participation in community life, projects of our own choosing, and so on.

We are also now in an age of ‘open source’ projects. Individuals with shared interests freely cooperate together outside the capital/wage labor relationship to produce products outside the commodity form, which are then distributed freely to anyone who would like to use them. The achievements of the open source model are already beyond dispute. In the present moment of world history we should be aiming to construct a society capable of mobilizing collective intelligence and creativity within the electronic commons far beyond the limits artificially imposed by capital (Smith, 2012; Mason, 2015; Srnicek and Williams, 2015). Having the time to undertake freely chosen pursuits is obviously crucial here in a manner Worrell and Krier completely overlook.

Worrell and Krier would insist that no matter how much the general intellect has advanced, there will still be a core set of tasks that need to be performed for social reproduction to occur. And so, they would add, a feasible social order demands that social agents take on those tasks with an utter seriousness belied by Marx’s cavalier proclamation that in post-capitalist society I will get to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, be a critic at night, ‘just as I have a mind to’. But this ‘just as I have a mind to’ doesn’t have to be read as implying that it’s all a matter of utter indifference. It could instead be read as an affirmation of the importance of freedom of choice of occupation and of activities besides those stemming from our occupation. This freedom is completely compatible with undertaking a freely made commitment with seriousness. If Worrell and Krier were to point out that there is no explicit reference to such seriousness in The German Ideology text, the point must be conceded. But there is no explicit denial of it either. Worrell and Krier opted for an uncharitable reading when a charitable one was available.

The case for the latter reading is immeasurably strengthened when we note that The German Ideology is not Marx’s only discussion of the issue. Other key passages must be looked at if we wish to make general pronouncements about Marx’s position. Unfortunately, Worrell and Krier overlook the two most important passages on this issue written by Marx.

The first key passage is found in a chapter from Volume 3 (Chapter 48, ‘The Trinity Formula’) that they cite in their paper. Marx makes a famous distinction here between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom:

The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. This realm of natural necessity expands with is development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite. (Marx, 1981 [1894]: 958–9)

Every sentence in this passage conveys the seriousness of the tasks that must be taken in the realm of necessity. The very use of the term ‘necessity’ here strongly emphasizes Marx’s view that there is nothing frivolous or haphazard in these activities, which every society – including every conceivable form of post-capitalism – must undertake. The Worrell/Krier reading of The German Ideology says in effect that Marx believes that in post-capitalism the realm of necessity will dissipate and only a realm of freedom remain. This is simply false. Further, Marx anticipates a realm of necessity that ‘govern(s) the human metabolism with nature in a rational way … with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature’. This can only be done with serious commitment, expertise, and formal organization – none of which fit with the Worrell/Krier picture of Marx’s views.

A second crucially important text in this context is Marx’s ‘Critique of the Gotha Program’. Among other criticisms of the program Marx rejects the idea that, in a post-capitalist society, workers can simply divide the total social product among themselves. Marx points out that considerable deductions will have to be made from the total social product for replacing and expanding the means of production, providing an insurance fund, meeting the costs of public education, and so on. The list also includes deductions to support those incapable of working. The other side of the coin, of course, is that Marx clearly assumes that all those who are not too old or infirm will work. When we examine the principle he proposes for advocating the distribution of wealth that remains the emphasis on the necessity of work in post-capitalism is even stronger: one’s share of social wealth is to correspond directly to one’s contribution to producing it. If there is a problem in Marx’s views here it lies in the opposite direction from Worrell and Krier’s worry. The real issue isn’t whether he overlooks the element of ‘sacrifice’ required by any social order, but whether he puts too much emphasis on ‘sacrifice’ when he seems to imply that an able person who chooses to not contribute to social wealth will not have a share in it.

At some indefinitely later point – when the realm of necessity has been more or less completely handed over to robots – Marx anticipates that a post-capitalist society will replace the principle of contribution with the famous ‘from each according to his or her ability, to each according to his or her needs’ precept. But here too the dominant social norm Marx recommends is not one where it is OK to do whatever you feel with whomever you want whenever you feel like it. The norm is for all to contribute to society in some way or other to the greatest extent of their abilities in return for access to the material preconditions of human flourishing. Here too if there is a problem in Marx’s views it lies in the opposite direction from Worrell and Krier’s worry. The real issue isn’t whether Marx ignored the need for social norms in post-capitalist society, but whether the norm he anticipates being appropriate at some indefinite future point is an excessively strong perfectionism. (Must everyone always contribute to the greatest extent of their abilities?).

This leaves a final question: would a social order where advances in the general intellect were used to reduce the work day and expand the realm of freedom necessarily tend to generate generalized incompetence and individual psychosis, as Worrell and Krier confidently assert? Speculating about the future, of course, is always fraught with uncertainties. But there is some relevant empirical evidence at hand that Worrell and Krier ought to find compelling: their own lives.

Universities today are hardly utopian spaces, to put it mildly. But people like Worrell and Krier, fortunate enough to hold tenured professorships, are in the (relatively) privileged position of being able to live (relatively) full lives, able to be fathers, husbands, teachers, authors, musicians, hikers, sailors, mechanics, students of literature, students of foreign cultures, and no doubt other things as well. Of course there are always time constraints, and no one would ever suggest that a variety of diverse activities all can be undertaken with an equal level of commitment or success. (Nothing in the German Ideology passage suggests otherwise.) Nonetheless, as far as one can judge, when Worrell and Krier take on different activities they have not done so in an attitude of frivolous indifference. The evidence suggests that they truly want to succeed in each of their endeavors to the greatest degree compatible with their priorities and responsibilities. As far as competence goes, they have fulfilled the obligations associated with their chosen occupation as teachers and scholars admirably. And far from being consumed by psychosis, as far as one can judge from the outside their lives have been immensely enriched by being able to undertake a diversity of pursuits besides their formal occupation. I fear Worrell and Krier have directed tremendous intellectual energy and rhetorical hyperbole to attacking Marx for calling for a society where everyone has a fair opportunity to live the precisely sorts of lives their own life choices endorse. This strikes me as a deep and lamentable pragmatic contradiction, one that could have been avoided with a more charitable reading of The German Ideology passage.

The strongest textual evidence supporting the Worrell/Krier critique of Marx remains to be considered.

Hegel, Marx, and Mediation

Worrell and Krier quote an extended passage from Marx where he explicitly rejects the determinations and mediations so central to Hegel’s Doctrine of the Syllogism. Taken on its own this text certainly appears to support their view that Marx conceived post-capitalism as a social order without structural determinations and mediations. Worrell and Krier are correct that Marx got something very wrong here. I do not believe it is what Worrell and Krier think. The problem lies instead in Marx’s reading of Hegel.

By the time he came to write The Philosophy of Right Hegel thought that the account of determinations and mediations in his Logic mandated that the determinations and mediations of generalized commodity production and exchange be affirmed. In the Doctrine of the Syllogism universality is not something above and beyond its particular determinations. It instead has actuality only through the open-ended disjunctive unity of them all, while simultaneously the actuality of concrete individuals is attained only through the mediation of those particular determinations. It follows, Hegel believed, that in the socio-political realm of ‘Objective Spirit’ the spirit of the community becomes actual in the disjunctive unity of the particular institutions of a free society: the family, and ‘the System of Needs’ (Hegel’s term for generalized commodity production), and higher-order industry associations (‘corporations’), and the agencies of the state apparatus that function to reconcile the interests of particular associations within a dynamic whole, and so on. Through the mediation of these particular institutions the universal spirit of political community becomes actual in its individual members. Hegel affirms generalized commodity production in specific for a variety of reasons. Voluntary exchanges, freedom of occupation, the freedom to develop new needs, and the freedom to determine the products that best meet those needs, all institutionalize the mutual recognition of co-subjects as free. The ‘invisible hand’ of market competition leads those pursuing economic self-interest to act in a manner that necessarily tends to contribute to the well-being of others. Market failures can be corrected by industry associations and states. And, finally, the family and the political community provide other spheres of freedom complementing the market.

We learn from Marx’s critique of political economy that the market society of generalized commodity production is not the sphere of freedom Hegel took it to be. Units of production and distribution are compelled to make the profit their overarching aim; individuals are compelled to put their living labor at the disposal of those units in order to obtain money for the purchase of the commodities their survival requires. Once the historically specific forms of generalized commodity production are in place a new ontological level emerges, the level of capital, a bizarre pseudo-subject imposing its inhuman end on the human subjects subordinated under it. Human ends now tend to be fulfilled when they further capital’s end of valorization. ⁶ They may be fulfilled if they prove compatible with it. But any human good that does not further the good of capital necessarily tends to be pushed to the margins of social life, if not obliterated altogether. ⁷

Marx took Hegel at his word. He accepted Hegel’s claim that his Logic and the institutional framework defended in The Philosophy of Right are inseparably and essentially linked. If this link is accepted, and if the promises made in The Philosophy of Right regarding the determinations and mediations of modern societies cannot be fulfilled, then it indeed follows that Hegel’s logical account of determinations and mediations must be rejected as well. Marx concluded that just as the talk of mediation in The Philosophy of Right masks the reign of capital, the invoking of mediations in Hegel’s’ Logic masks an alien universal, Absolute Spirit, lording over the particulars and individuals it subsumes.

This was a mistake on Marx’s part, one that far too many Marxists have repeated far too often. ⁸ If Marx had not been so quick to take Hegel at his word, he might have realized that Hegel’s Doctrine of the Syllogism provides a vocabulary for critiquing a social order based on an infinite and insane quantitative drive to accumulate capital as an end in itself. Capital is not a concrete universal in Hegel’s sense, reconciling human subjects through the mutual recognition of freedom and well-being. Capital is an abstract universal, imposing its alien imperatives (Commodify! Monetarize! Valorize!) on human subjects in a way that systematically restricts their freedom and flourishing. Hegel did not see this because he, like the classical political economists and mainstream social theorists ever since, lacked an adequate concept of capital.

Worrell and Krier make an inverse mistake. They conclude from the fact that Marx rejected the false promise of mediations and determinations offered in the Philosophy of Right that he rejected mediations and determinations in general. This conclusion does not follow. The quote they provide rejects only Hegel’s attempt to logically prove that the irreconcilable antagonisms of generalized commodity production can be reconciled. Worrell and Krier once again opted for an uncharitable reading when a more charitable reading provides a far better ‘all things considered’ interpretation of Marx’s views.

It is now time to turn to what I take to be the most compelling reason to reject the Worrell/Krier account.

The Essay on the Paris Commune

In his essay ‘On the Civil War in France’ Marx assesses the significance of the Paris Commune of 1871, brutally suppressed by a French army acting with the active encouragement of the German victors in the just completed Franco-Prussian war. The importance of this essay should be clear from Marx’s statement that the Commune was ‘the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour’ (Marx, 1986 [1871]: 334). If we wish to discover how Marx thought of a post-capitalist society, this is a place to look.

In the forms of democracy familiar in privileged regions of capitalism today lip service is given to the principle that those exercising political authority should be accountable to those over whom the authority is exercised. But the application of this principle is profoundly limited in two crucial ways. First, the only decisions categorized as ‘political’ are made by those occupying state offices. The process of the production and appropriation of social wealth – especially the process of producing and appropriating a social surplus – is treated as a ‘private’ matter, left to the contractual agreements of individual economic agents. This is a profound category mistake. Authority exercised in the so-called economic ‘sphere’ by the agents of capital is inherently political, determining the path taken by polity in conjunction with the decisions of state officials. Second, as long as capital reigns the democratization of the political ‘sphere’ (in the inadequate narrow sense) will be profoundly restricted, making any talk of popular sovereignty an expression of ideological delusion or cynical opportunism. ⁹ In the Hegelian jargon employed by Worrell and Krier, the moment of universality here is not the spirit of the community as a whole, ‘the I that is We and the We that is I’, even if the mechanisms of formal democracy are in place. Capital continues to reign as an alien universal, imposing its imperatives on a social world distracted by the spectacle of politics.

In its brief existence the Paris Commune offered a glimpse of another ‘political form’ in both respects. In capitalism the universal moment in the workplace is capital, represented by managers directly or indirectly appointed by investors to ensure that the particular activities and ends of the men and women are subordinated to the activity and end of capital (‘the self-valorization of value’). Contra Hegel, this arrangement generates a fundamental and irreconcilable antagonism between capital and the individuals subject to its alien imperatives in the workplace. What is needed is a form of universality that would truly reconcile individuals within the enterprise through the mediation of a series of particular tasks and activities compatible with their flourishing. A shared consensus regarding the functions and tasks to be taken on by a workplace that emerges from a process of democratic deliberation among workers, and is then implemented under the oversight of managers elected by, and continually accountable to, those over whom their authority is exercised, would be such a universal. When translated into Hegelianese, in other words, Marx’s defense of the Commune amounts to the claim that it provides a political form where a concrete universal, capable of mediating particularity and singularity in precisely the manner Hegel depicted in his (onto)logical account of the disjunctive syllogism – a mediation promised but not delivered in the institutional framework of The Philosophy of Right – can become actual only if the process of producing and allocating social wealth within formal organizations is explicitly recognized as a political process and workplaces are understood as political communities where political authority is exercised. If all voices had a truly fair chance to be heard and affect the process of determining the direction and leadership of the workplace, the mutual recognition and reconciliation Hegel sought would be institutionalized to a far higher degree than in the workplaces of capitalist market societies.

Marx does not treat workplaces as spaces where free-floating individuals form random binary relationships based on their fleeting whims, as in the Worrell/Krier (mis)reading of the sort of post-capitalist society Marx endorsed. The basic unit of social ontology here is the political community of the workplace as a whole, not any series of binary relationships among its members. Its unity is constituted through a collective agreement regarding an open-ended series of particular functions and tasks, and the behavior of individual members assigned to carry them out. This collective agreement is the social norm, the ‘Big Other’ (in a deeply problematic manner of speaking), Worrell and Krier failed to find in Marx. Here is ‘the logic of post-capitalist mediation’ they claim is ‘missing from Marx’s thought’. And here is where we see how off the mark Worrell and Krier are when they proclaim that ‘nothing could be further from Marx’s concept of the political’ than ‘participation in “the universal sustaining medium” where sacrifices are reciprocated’. A self-managed workplace instituting deliberative democracy is based on a reciprocal agreement to abide by the result of the collective decision-making process, even when you would have preferred that a different set of projects had been agreed to, or that different persons were elected to oversee their performance and integration. The Worrell/Krier assertion that Marx anticipated a post-capitalist society where everyone gets to do what they want with whom they want whenever they want is simply not sustainable. If that were the case, there would be no need for a system of authority and decision-making at the enterprise level, whereby the behavior of those subject to that authority and those decisions is mediated and determined. Marx may not have used the term ‘disjunctive syllogism’ in his essay on the Commune. But the idea is surely there. ¹⁰

Marx explicitly denies that correct decisions within self-managed workplaces will always be made (Marx, 1986 [1871]: 333). Particular functions and tasks that fit one set of circumstances may be applied when they are not appropriate. Managers may prove to be ineffective, or to abuse their power. Plans based on a set of expectations will have to be modified if those expectations are not fulfilled. The unfortunate human tendency for particular self-interests to be proclaimed as universal will not magically dissipate. And there is nothing in the logic of Marx’s position implying that all conflicts are automatically overcome in worker self-management. Enterprise democracy would not magically eliminate all the petty (and sometimes not so petty) grievances and jealousies that can arise in a community, and it would not magically guarantee that those grievances and jealousies will never cause a workplace to become irredeemably dysfunctional. The claim is simply that (1) the political form of deliberative participatory democracy in principle allows mistakes to be brought to light and corrected relatively quickly, and (2) the systematic (structural) tendency to antagonism that is an emergent property of capitalism would be overcome. This would not create a Garden of Eden. But it would count as a significant normative advance in world history.

Particular projects and policies must also be adopted in the local cities and rural areas. Here too the political form of deliberative democracy, including the election of officials subject to recall (and, Marx added, paid average workers’ wages) would allow collective agreements to emerge. These agreements would constitute a concrete universal, reconciling individual citizens through the mediation of the particular projects and policies that were adopted. Higher-level unities must integrate individual enterprises and individual communities through the mediation of particular projects and policies on regional (national and ultimately international) levels as well. In capitalist market societies capital is the (alien) universality on these higher levels too, with the substantive power to impose its good and its end on social life, even when formal democracy is institutionalized within a limited (and thereby impoverished) political sphere. Marx insists once again that decisions regarding the production and allocation of social wealth are inherently political matters, and that (along with other higher-level political matters) the decision-making should be in the hands of higher-order democratic bodies consisting of representatives elected by, and accountable to, more local communities and enterprises. The collective agreements that emerge would then actualize the sort of concrete universality Hegel describes in his Doctrine of the Syllogism to a far greater degree than the political order Hegel himself endorsed in The Philosophy of Right. Here too we find an account of a political form with mediations and determinations, refuting the Worrell/Krier thesis that Marx anticipated a post-capitalist world where everyone does whatever they want whenever they want with whomever they want. The collective decisions made on the various levels provide a set of social norms, a functional equivalent for the ‘Big Other’ Worrell and Krier so often complain Marx lacks. ¹¹

There is no shortage of critical questions that must be posed regarding this political form. Which decision-making body should make which sorts of decisions? ¹² How can the fundamental interests of minorities that are outvoted in deliberative bodies be protected? Won’t there be a need for a permanent support staff for those elected to positions of authority and, if so, how can excessive bureaucratization be best avoided? How can we ensure that the time required to participate effectively in self-management in workplaces and communities does not exceed the time people choose to devote? What sort of incentives will be necessary? How can we ensure that units of production and distribution failing to maintain acceptable levels of efficiency are restructured to become more effective, or shut down when restructurings have failed? Marx never addresses such questions, trusting in the creative intelligence of subsequent generations to discover appropriate answers. After the horrors of Stalinism, however, anyone proposing that ‘another world is possible’ needs to face them. A relatively extensive literature on post-capitalist society has attempted to do just that (for example, Schweickart, 1993, 2002; McNally, 1993; Smith, 2000: ch. 7, 2005: ch. 8; Westra, 2015: ch. 6; Srnicek and Williams, 2015; Mason, 2016).

Worrell and Krier feel no need to engage with this literature. They have utter confidence they know already how any attempt to construct an alternative to capitalism along the lines Marx sketched must inevitably end: with degeneration to an iron cage of bureaucratic command. In the discussion of the Commune they treat this assertion as so self-evident no argument for it is needed. The discussion of Lacan elsewhere in the paper, however, provides support for their a priori dismissal of Marx’s reflections. We read there that social life demands the external imposition of an alien ‘law of the father’ on its individual members. This comes at the cost of constituting them as neurotic subjects. But any attempt to dissipate the force of this alien law leaves them drifting into forms of psychosis, eventually making collective social life together impossible. Marx neglected this dark dimension of human existence, leaving behind a social theory based on naïve rationalism and delusion about the human condition. Any attempt to put his theory into practice will only create a void at the center of social life that coercive bureaucratic power will rush to fill.

A coherent (if unacceptable) critique of Marx can be made from this point of view, reminiscent of the rule of the demos made by defenders of the authoritarian state from Plato to Carl Schmitt. Worrell and Krier, however, cannot coherently adopt this line of criticism, given their affirmation of Hegel. For Hegel, no less than Marx, a social order ruled by an alien law imposed on subjects externally was one in which spirit was not ‘at home’ with itself. No less than Marx, Hegel too thought that amidst the zigs and zags of empirical history, all its extensive stagnation and horrific regressions, it is nonetheless possible to discern advances in world history in the direction of overcoming such alienation. The measure of this advance is the extent to which ‘the law’ (the dominant social forms and social practices) constituting the social order can be recognized as a social creation and rationally affirmed by social agents. Hegel rejected the radical pessimism Worrell and Krier hint at in their discussion of Lacan. In so far as Worrell and Krier accept Hegel’s guiding idea that a normatively acceptable social order reconciling universality, particularity, and singularity along the line of the Doctrine of the Syllogism can be actualized, they must reject this radical pessimism too. They must, in other words, leave open the possibility of a ‘Big Other’ that isn’t so other. Given their affirmation of Hegel, in short, Worrell and Krier cannot coherently reject Marx’s project a priori on Lacanian grounds.

They could reject Marx’s suggestions in the Paris Commune essay coherently if they affirmed Hegel’s claim in the Philosophy of Right that the logic of mediations outlined in the Doctrine of the Syllogism is concretely actualized through a universal moment defined by the dialectical interconnections of a hereditary monarch, an extensive unelected civil service ultimately accountable only to that monarch, and a legislature dominated by local landlords and business elites. Nothing in their paper remotely suggests that Worrell and Krier find this institutional framework (or anything like it) remotely acceptable.

This brings us to a final question: what exactly is Worrell and Krier’s positive alternative to Marx regarding where we go from here in world history?

The Worrell/Krier Alternative

Two paths forward from the present moment are found in the paper. It is unclear whether readers are supposed to take them as ultimately identical; I shall consider them separately. In my view the first is unacceptable, the second woefully inadequate.

The first alternative is implicit in their discussion of Mauss, who studied societies where the moment of universality, so to speak, uniting the community was embodied in sacred gift objects possessing ‘collective effervescence’. Defenders of the rationality of modern society mocked the ‘primitive’ tribes that believed spiritual properties could be discerned in things. Marx mocked these theorists for ignoring how modern capitalism is dominated by things with special supersensuous powers (‘values’) on a far greater scale than any tribe studied by anthropologists. Worrell and Krier in their turn now mock Marx for failing to realize that every possible social formation must always rest on the circulation of sacred things. From this perspective Worrell and Krier go beyond Marx by transforming social theory into political theology.

The practical implication of this transformation seems reasonably clear, even if it is not explicitly drawn in the paper: at the present moment of world history we must maintain a state of openness to a new dispensation of the sacred, some new set of sacred things whose circulation will somehow generate a ‘collective effervescence’ somehow superior to the emergence of the supersensuous property, value, in the circulation of commodities.

This conclusion is reminiscent of Heidegger’s proclamation that at the present moment of world history we have a responsibility to remain patiently in a state of openness for Being to reveal itself in some new way. And it shares all the shortcomings of Heidegger’s position. Like Being, the messages (supposedly) sacred things (supposedly) dictate to us will always be ambiguous, and those accepted in one context will always need to be reinterpreted in another. The circulation of supposedly sacred things, no less than the revelation of Being, therefore always demands a privileged cohort with the social power to interpret the messages. Heidegger notoriously got the message of Being horribly wrong in the 1930s. Critical theorists should learn the lesson of his error. Repeated invocations of Being, the sacredness of certain circulating things, or anything of that sort, is a profoundly dangerous and inadequate foundation for social theory. Its ideological effect is to repress the very questions that most need to be asked. How do we know that the interpreters of the meaning of Being, or of circulating sacred things, got it right? Why should we assume they will reliably be correct? Should they have such all-encompassing power? Do the institutions and social practices they endorse allow everyone in the society a fair chance to live flourishing lives, or do they (intentionally or unintentionally) systematically advantage some groups over others? Do these institutions and practices provide a way to correct the mistakes that will inevitably be made in social life reasonably quickly? Theological politics is depoliticized politics, a way of shielding elites exercising political authority from being politically accountable to those over whom their authority is exercised. (That was not the least of the social effects of the circulation of sacred gifts in the stratified societies Mauss describes.)

The alternative project implicit in Worrell and Krier’s discussion of Mauss is also not consistent with their allegiance to Hegel. From Hegel’s standpoint, to grant the primacy in social life to the movement of things, sacred or otherwise, is to affirm an archaic social order where spirit is not ‘at home’ with itself. For Hegel, as for Marx, realizing that social forms and social practices are human creations, and not dictated to us by external things, counts as a normative advance in world history. ¹³

The element of truth in the notion of ‘collective effervescence’ is that political life always has an affective dimension. Certain things will always have a symbolic import that matters politically. Marx’s project of overcoming the fetish character of objects does not imply that we could ever have (or should ever want) a social world without objects having deep cultural resonance. The point is that no specific political form can be deduced from the importance of things with special symbolic import. Any specific policy that some groups associate with symbolically resonating things still needs to be critically discussed and evaluated, rather than allowing the symbolic resonance of things to blindly and automatically determine the direction of social life. A suitably developed, modified, and revised system of the deliberative participatory democracy prefigured (however inadequately) by the Paris Commune could combine the circulation of things with symbolic resonance with open-ended deliberation about the future path of social life. To abandon that project is to not to heed Walter Benjamin’s plea for a future that redeems the past, but to adopt what Benjamin feared, a future endlessly repeating the catastrophes of the past. For the latter would surely result from handing over social power to circulating sacred things – which always means to whoever has the power to proclaim what those things dictate.

As noted above, the idea that we should wait for the emergence of new sacred things with ‘collective effervescence’ as an alternative to Marx’s project is left implicit in the paper. The explicit way forward recommended by Worrell and Krier at the end of their paper is quite different: to adopt the poiesis of Walt Whitman.

Whitman is undoubtedly a great poet. But this is an astounding conclusion for a long paper devoted to a vehement attack on Marx for his alleged neglect of the importance of determinations and mediations in a post-capitalist society. Readers had a right to expect at least some discussion of the sort of determinations and mediations Worrell and Krier think a post-capitalist society should have. Should a capitalist sector retain a subordinate place? Should there be an extensive use of markets, limited use of markets, or no markets at all? Should all firms be transformed into worker co-operatives, or only some? Should private ownership of productive resources be widely dispersed or abolished altogether? What democratic procedures should be adopted, and how extensively should they be employed? Should there be completely centralized planning, completely decentralized planning, or some complicated mixture of the two? How would the danger of excessive bureaucratization be addressed? Whiteman has absolutely nothing specific to say about any of this, just vague references to ‘democracy’ far less determinate that the (admittedly inadequate) sketch of deliberative participatory democracy Marx proposed. Worrell and Krier apparently do not have anything specific to say about any of that either.

Instead of an even preliminary discussion of the determinations and mediations of a post-capitalist society we get powerful quotes from Whitman exhorting us to live and love creatively. Well, yes, we should do that. But it is simply breathtaking that a paper obsessed with the allegedly vacuous indeterminacy of Marx’s projection of the future could end with a message of, well, vacuous indeterminacy. And to whom does Whitman address this message? To his lovers. In other words, a paper dismissing Marx with awe-inspiring polemical exuberance on the basis of his (supposed) incapacity to go beyond dyadic relationships culminates with romantic affirmation of, well, dyadic relationships. This is not the way to go beyond Marx. Worrell and Krier do not really have a way to go beyond Marx at all.

The project of constructing a critical social theory for the 21st century would be immensely harmed by abandoning the project of replacing capitalist market societies with the democratization of all exercises of political power. As far as I can discern, this project is not ruled out by logic, by biology, by anthropology, and certainly not by the historical fact that it has not yet been institutionalized. ¹⁴ A dogmatic insistence otherwise is just that: dogmatic. From our present historical perspective as practical agents we should not accept that the limits of possibility are defined by the limits of Worrell and Krier’s imagination. If the radically pessimistic view that a significantly more substantial democratization of public power than that compatible with capitalism is not possible proves true, that depressing result will be contingent, knowable only a posteriori. In the meantime critical theorists should insist on the openness of history in the absence of absolutely compelling evidence that it is closed off.

A better way to go beyond Marx would be to build upon his critique of political economy and the political project following from it, correcting what he got wrong, modifying what needs to be modified in our changed circumstances, supplementing it on the many matters he did not address, and so on. Much of Worrell and Krier’s past work has done precisely that. Hopefully they will do so again, and direct their considerable polemical skills against more deserving targets.