BOOK REVIEW
(Pogrebinschi, Thamy. 2009. O enigma do político. Marx contra a política moderna. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira)
A book that, with remarkable erudition, addresses politics and State in
the immense theoretical work of Marx does not need many justifications nowadays.
If in the 1980s and 1990s Marxism was to philosophy, ideology and the
official social science a definitely lost continent, the extraordinary volume
of scholarly meetings, specialized publications, critiques and renewed
translations of Marx’s works over the last ten years only confirm the rising
interest in this theory, at least in Brazil (Boito Jr. and Motta 2010). Thamy
Pogrebinschi’s book is part of this new wave and is eloquent testimony that the
old social division of scientific labor, which split and hierarchically categorized
the academic community in “producers of theory” (the French, British, Germans,
Americans) and “consumers of theory” (the Latin-Americans), makes increasingly
less sense.
Only that now this consistent and resolute university Marxism does not reign
alone in the national intellectual scene as was the case during the glorious
period between the late 1950s and the late 1970s (Ridenti 2010). Instead, it has to face strong
competitors, in Brazil and abroad, as for example, an increasingly more
methodologically sophisticated Political Science, an academically
institutionalized Sociology and, especially, a Political Philosophy relentlessly
posing ever more difficult questions that cannot be ignored, theoretically and
empirically. These questions range from multiculturalism to feminism; from
egalitarianism to libertarianism; from the politics of recognition to
communicative action; from a theory of justice to the new democratic forms of
participation and deliberation. That is why it is not only impossible but useless
to counter all these subjects merely with some ideological manias that excited
generations of Marxists throughout the 20th century: the triumphalism of the October
revolution, the apocalyptical pessimism of the Critical Theory, the optimism in
face of the counter-hegemonic strategies, confidence in Eurocommunism, and the
renewal of the western communist parties.
Thamy Pogrebinschi’s essay on the “enigma of the political” in Marx’s
thought seems to build precisely on the current stage of contemporary Political
Theory and, in particular, on the Democratic Theory, to propose a much more
ambitious question: once the social revolution is accomplished and the modern
State and its representative and governance institutions have been superseded,
how should, according to Marx himself, politics be in the communist society?
(p. 18-19). The answer that will arise thereof, Thamy believes, “may allow a
change of perspective in the way political theory is conceived of and done
today” (p. 22). After all, Marx would have known, since his first writings, how
to foresee problems and anticipate the solutions for the contemporary crisis of
political representation (p. 259).
To think like Marx thought of politics after the end of politics is to
reflect upon what the political should be. In the philosophical language that
the author borrows from the young Marx, to discover the Marxian formula for the
organization of men in the society of the future is to try to say which would
ultimately be the essence of the
political – that is, the essence of that world where the State is no longer
separated from society and where society does not know alienation,
contradiction, and domination. The whole discussion is hinged on a host of
hypothesized norms, strewn across the entire theoretical work produced by Marx,
the essay patiently attempts to rebuild.
This project imposes two tasks upon the commentary on Marx that must be
conducted concomitantly, something which is also a source of great
complications: in order to reveal which would be the post-capitalist political
structures and how they would function it is necessary, at the same time, to
discover the categories that, drawing
on Marx himself, would make it possible to think of such structures. Or, for
another: if the notions of modern State, civil society, class, “real, active
men” (the expression employed by Marx and Engels in The German ideology), and domination work adequately in the Marxian
theoretical discourse on pre-communist societies, in order to understand the
communist society it is necessary to think in radically new terms. It is
necessary to think in terms of community, association, individual, human
essence, and emancipation. In such a world, modern politics would be replaced
by “true democracy”. Thus, in place of State authority, there would be
self-determination; in place of political representation by professional
politicians, self-government; and in place of bureaucratic despotism, autogestion.
Read like that, the book’s goal is, at first sight, to discuss the
institutional genesis and concrete functioning of the political structures of a
social world redeemed by the Revolution. But it is not exactly like that. The
author warns the reader that at the core of her analysis is the concept of democracy. Not the really
existing (capitalist) democracy, nor the potentially attainable (communist)
democracy. Engels himself emphasized that, in discussing such matters, “We are
not talking about the things which belong to the nineteenth century,
and which are bad and ephemeral, but about categories which are eternal and
which existed before ‘the mountains were brought forth’ [...]” (p. 209). This
is, in short, the essence of
democracy. And theorizing about it is theorizing about what the political
proper should be in the
post-capitalist society.
The awkwardness of any reader of Marx in face of this singular passage is
not unjustified. Eternal categories? Essences? Yet, doesn’t this insistence on
reading Marx on the basis of concepts rather than of the “things” of the real
social world betray the very spirit of the theory? A theory, after all, that has
always insisted on denouncing the illusion of the natural, the eternal, and the
universal? The operation of converting Marx into a “political philosopher” has
its setbacks eventually. As Thamy makes Marx talk about what should be (and not
about what is), she seems to subvert the foundational principle that is at the
root of the Marxian judgment itself: the social conditions of the possibility
of the possible world.
The book is organized into four considerably long chapters, each one addressing
the theme of the organization of ideal power– and not the traditional theme of
the taking over of real power – on one hand. The first chapter discusses the
end of the State; the second, the society resulting thereof (the “real
community”); the third, its peculiar mode of political organization; and the
fourth chapter, the scope of the political for Marx: human emancipation. Within
the limits of this review I intend to comment only on the question of the new
form of political coordination of the human community or that which Marx,
Engels, and Lenin later on will designate as “true democracy”, by opposition to
the really existing democracy in the West in the 19th century.
The enigma of the political builds
on three controversial assumptions established by the author: i) that Marx’s work is a coherent system
of ideas (that is, assumptions, theses, concepts) and the division that was
established between a “young Marx” and a “mature Marx” (Althusser 1965) is
extravagant and arbitrary (as indeed was held, among others, by Cerroni (1973));
ii) that it is necessary to get rid
of the Marxist tradition (its epigones, its aficionados, and its interpreters) in
order to be able to have access to the true sense of the Marxian text (along
with Althusser (1965); Rubel (1974); Preve (1984), etc.); and iii) that the guiding thread in Marx’s
work is not the fundamental contradiction between Capital and Labor (that is,
his Political Economy), or between productive forces and relations of
production (his Philosophy of History), but the opposition between State and
Civil Society, such as approached in his critique of Hegel. It is this
opposition that provides the cornerstones for his Political Philosophy and
allows us, by connecting the two ends of his work, to decipher him. Marx’s
entire theoretical, political and ideological forty-year-long journey only led
him to the starting point: the radical democrat (Saes 1994) would be hiding in
the revolutionary socialist, just like the boy in the man. Hence the strategic
interest of the first writings for an accurate understanding (along the same
line adopted by Colletti (1969a; 1969b), for example). And, it is assumed, to
evaluate the dimension of his actual contribution.
These three points call for a brief commentary. It is not the case of
recuperating herein the problems implicated in the history of the theoretical
formation of Marx’s thought and its canonical periodization. Several critics
have already drawn attention to the misguided understanding that postulates, as
Althusser (1999, 9) postulated, the existence of a “radical” difference between
the texts written before The German
ideology, still captive of philosophy and, especially, of Hegel’s German
idealism and Feuerbach’s idealist materialism, and the machinery of scientific
concepts, like mode of production, relations of production, productive forces,
and so on, employed in The capital. The
existence or not of an “epistemological rupture” (Althusser 1965, 25) between
the two Marxs is a dispute that would take us too far. Still, if Thamy would
rather not reintroduce this discussion and division, it would at least be
necessary to demonstrate more than the existence of a “strong relation” between
the earlier and the later texts written by Marx, lest we forcefully identify,
behind the same words, the same ideas. Even
though Marx resorted, in a book like The Eighteenth
Brumaire, to the same terms employed in the pamphlets of the New Rhine Gazette (“State”, “civil
society”), both their sense and function in this theoretical discourse are at
the moment of the drafting of the essay on the coup against Bonaparte,
fundamentally different. We
might say, as indeed the author himself did in his Preface to the Critique of political economy, that the
more adjusted terms from now on to explain the social world should be “superstructure”
and “infrastructure”; and that between these two elements there is no opposition, as argued in his critical
review of Hegel’s philosophy of right, but a concrete interconnection; and, finally, that it is the interconnecting principles
of this social totality (determination, discrepancy, correspondence, conditioning)
that allow us both to distinguish the distinct historical modes of production
and to explain their forms of reproduction and transformation.
The other proposition calling for a commentary is that advocated by Thamy
concerning the “incompatibility of all political and ideological Marxism with
the teachings of Marx”, to speak as Maximilien Rubel. This stance has the
advantage and the disadvantage of sparing Thamy from debating a key theme – what
politics would be like in the communist world – with the vast literature that
Marxists and Marxologists have
produced in that regard. Yet, that is not exactly what we read in this enticing
book. Not only does Thamy correct formulations based on misguided translations
of fundamental terms for Marx and advances new interpretations of read and
reread passages from which she extracts a political moral which is quite
different from conventional communist orthodoxy, but also she actually chooses
two interlocutors to dialogue with: Abensour (1998) and Avineri (1968). It is
in relation to their formulations (at times against them, others, in favor)
that she will explain how Marx actually thought of the political organization
of a classless society, its virtues and foundations. According to Thamy
Pogrebinschi, and this is her main thesis, this is the angle that should be favored
if one wishes to unravel the enigma of
the political in the Marxian work.
A long time ago Norberto Bobbio drew the Marxists’ attention to the exaggerated
importance they assigned to the “famous, at times, too famous, indications that
Marx extracted from the Commune [of Paris] and which had the fortune of being
exalted (but never attenuated) by Lenin” (Bobbio 1979, 31). The indelible effect
thereof was to rid them of the obligation of predicting and thinking,
effectively, the shape and functioning of political institutions under
socialism (“dictatorship of the proletariat”) and under the society without
State (communism) (Bobbio 1983). Actually, continues Bobbio (1979, 31), “Marx had
no intention of providing prescriptions with those few formulas [about the
experience of the Paris Commune] for the future and only the abuse of the
principle of authority [...] transformed five or six theses into a Public Law
treatise”.
The enigma of the political does not fall into that trap. This is not about evoking
the famous five or six theses, nor is it about evoking what Engels, Kautsky,
Rosa, Lenin, and others said. Thamy Pogrebinschi reconstructs, with all the
confidence that a sound knowledge of Marx’s various writings on the subject
enables, his set of political principles regarding
the political form that would succeed the dictatorship of the proletariat. But
what are the characteristics of this true democracy? Thamy lists a dozen
distinctive features of this peculiar form of life which has (or intends to
have) the capacity to solve the paradoxes of “modern” (i.e., capitalist) politics.
True democracy, the paradigm of all forms of government, would abolish
the separation (“alienation”) between man and political structure. It would not
be the outcome of juridical fiction (the “social contract” as a product of
“individual wills”), but a real expression of “the people’s lives”, based on
the activity of real human beings and not on abstract subjects of rights. Hence
the difficulty in capturing its final form in a fixed set of political
institutions – and, therefore, the difficulty of the Marxists in coming up with
the ideal prescription for the ideal political regime. Rather, true democracy
would presuppose a set of social precepts: those who manage the community
politically would be the same ones working in it productively, the social
division of labor would have disappeared, work itself would not be commanded by
necessity, human action would have to be the very expression of freedom, each one’s
development would lead to the other’s development and the development of all,
to the development of the community.
That accomplished, “popular sovereignty” (that is, the constituent power
formalized in a Constitutional Charter, another legal fiction) would give place
to community self-determination, “active citizenship” of sorts, where all is
political or, for another, where there are no individual, personal, private
activities but, rather, public roles, functions, insofar as all the social
practices of the individuals ultimately concern the collective management of
the community, the administration of things ordinary. As in classical democracy,
the political participation of men would be associated with their social
existence.
In this new world, self-government would replace political
representation, mandate, and mediation, since there would exist a kind of
“synchronicity and completeness of the relation between the parts and the whole”
(p. 230). The best image to represent this fantasy would be that of the
orchestra without the conductor. Each musician would tune her/his instrument in
harmony with the other instruments and the correct pitch and tempo would be
defined by the whole as a whole. Thus, the adequate category to envisage the
functioning of this peculiar democracy should not be decision or deliberation,
but interaction. Government itself is no longer a political question (entailing
thus power, prestige, hierarchy and domination), but rather a mere
administrative question, depending on the workers’ cooperative’s management
model.
Even without explicitly formulating a theory of the future form of
government, Marx provides some indications of the political institutions of
this true democracy. Or of what should not exist as political institution. As
political and social power cannot be separated from the community, transferred
to a representative, and is much less monopolized by some, the very legislative
function would have to be carried out by all (a different problem, as can be
seen, from the imperative mandate, valid for the transition period, not for
communism). Therefore, there would be no need for suffrage, nor would there exist
professional politicians, political parties, and a Legislative Branch, an
institution specializing in the task of filtering interests and drafting bills.
Indeed, there would not even be the traditional separation between legislative
and executive work, since those who legislate must also test in practice the
efficacy of the legislation.
In sum, true democracy for Marx, according to Thamy Pogrebinschi, is
neither a form of State, nor a form of government, much less a system of
government. True democracy is the rejection of all the forms, principles and
institutions of liberal democracy and, specifically, the rejection, and not
merely the correction, of its deadlocks – a lack of representativeness of the
elected, lack of enthusiasm of the voters, irrelevance of the parliaments, the
arrogance of the Executive Branch and its bureaucracy, decadence of the role of
the political parties as spheres for political socialization. Instead of all
that, Marx bets on a radical, direct, active and profoundly humane democracy, since
it is tied to the practices and experiences that constitute true human beings, as
redeemed from exploitation, alienation, and domination.
What should we make of all this? When one bears in mind the historical
memory of totalitarianisms, fanaticisms grounded in purported general wills or
even less solemn, though equally troubling, problems as, for example, the inevitable
tendency toward an oligarchy of partisan organizations (Michels), the dilemmas
of collective participation and of mobilization (Olson) or even the inevitable
transformation of traditional forms of political socialization (Manin), Marx’s
political imagination seems to have solved all that still needs solving.
It is rather far-fetched to hold that Marx’s fantasies about politics in
the communist society enable us to solve the problems and deadlocks of the
Democratic Theory, especially the dilemma of representation (the question
regarding the control over elected representatives, the problem of the
development of merely corporatist concerns by the caste of professional
representatives, the contradiction between the aspiration of professional
politicians to be representatives of the general interest and their reality as
advocates of private interests, and so forth.). Nonetheless, one of the great
merits of Thamy Pogrebinschi’s book is to establish a new boundary for
mainstream Political Theory, or rather, a new set of themes and a huge
constraint with which it is necessary at least to dialogue. After all, if we
accept (at least as an intellectual exercise) the Marxian critique of the
fiction of the very principle of representation in the liberal society, about
the inefficacy of suffrage and the impossibility of capitalist democracy to
promote “true democracy”, then the whole contemporary debate about guaranteeing
political rights to minorities, about the need to promote ever more
“participation” of stakeholders in public decisionmaking or about the value of
free, rational, and critical communication between men loses great part of its
sense. As summarized by Thamy, the Marxian lesson is: there is no improving
liberal democracy without questioning the normative assumptions and
institutional mechanisms on which this political form is founded. Thus, more
(liberal) democracy is more of the same: a medicine that runs the risk of
worsening the patient’s situation. Moral: to disregard Marx is absolutely not
advantageous to any political scientist.
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