Dublin Opinion

I was talking to a member of the Socialist Party recently enough who admitted, with a certain defiant air, that she had never read anything by Karl Marx. It wasn’t that she was not interested in Marx’s ideas; rather that she didn’t feel the need. Being a member of a radical Left party and having hung out with many on the radical left well before she ever joined the party Marx and his ideas were always ‘in the air’, like a sprite perhaps, haunting their conversations and adding a spectral ethereal shadow to their arguments.

Or maybe, I’m thinking now, she never bothered because she was sick of ‘socialists’ prefacing all their comments with ‘As Marx said in Das Capital’, and vowed from an early age not to get caught up in the clichés of Marxist orthodoxy, as regularly spouted by earnest student types. Indeed, like Paul Calf, she hated students, having dropped out of school herself before finishing her A-Levels (an atypical, though admirably brave move considering both her parents were academics).

But still, I was surprised. I presumed Marx would be required reading for any one who had spent a freezing afternoon on a street corner selling the party newspaper.

I’m moving house at the moment, which means that I’ve started sifting through my old notes and photocopied articles that I’ve kept over the years, dreaming perhaps that they might come in useful one day – if for example, I was struck by lightening and found myself, after recovering from the electric shock treatment, transformed into a motivated individual. The difficult part of this sifting, of course, is to decide which notes and articles to chuck in the bin. But it also has the advantage of reintroducing you to stuff you’d long forgotten about and providing the opportunity to reread them, or in some cases, reading them all the way through for the first time.

This weekend, facing that battered cardboard box that I’ve carted around several house moves, I found The Spectres of Marx, by Jacques Derrida, which I remember photocopying from The New Left Review when I came across it in the college Library sometime around 1995 or 96. I realized also that I hadn’t read it all. I’d only got about half way through it before the deconstructive riffing on the terms coined by Marx got too much to bear.

For example, here’s a bit where Derrida discusses Marx’s use of a wooden table to suggest how an object becomes a commodity in the Capitalist system (Marx using the metaphorical trope of theatre to argue that when the table is entered into the market it is like an actor who appears on the Stage – the market - to perform for the consumer):

For example — and here is where the table comes on stage — the wood remains wooden when it is made into a table: it is then “an ordinary, sensuous thing [ein ordindäres, sinnliches Ding]”. It is quite different when it becomes a commodity, when the curtain goes up on the market and the table plays actor and character at the same time, when the commodity-table, says Marx, comes on stage (auftritt), begins to walk around and to put itself forward as a market value. Coup de theatre: the ordinary, sensuous thing is transfigured (verwandelt sich), it becomes someone, it assumes a figure. This woody and headstrong denseness is metamorphosed into a supernatural thing, a sensuous non-sensuous thing, sensuous but non-sensuous, sensuously supersensible (verwandelt er sich in ein sinnlich übersinnliches Ding). The ghostly schema now appears indispensable. The commodity is a “thing” without phenomenon, a thing in flight that surpasses the senses (it is invisible, intangible, inaudible, and odourless); but this transcendence is not altogether spiritual, it retains that bodiless body which we have recognised as making the difference between spectre and spirit. What surpasses the senses still passes before us in the silhouette of the sensuous body that it nevertheless lacks or that remains inaccessible to us. Marx does not say sensuous and non-sensuous, or sensuous but non-sensuous.’ he says: sensuous non-sensuous, sensuously supersensible. Transcendence, the movement of super-, the step beyond (über, epekeina), is made sensuous in that very excess. It renders the non-sensuous sensuous.

See what I mean? Actually this is very interesting but it’s made more difficult because the original text that Derrida is referring to is not quoted in full – and I don’t own or have ever read, even less quoted, Das Kapital, as it is popularly referred too. The Spectres of Marx was originally presented as a lecture at a 1993 symposium titled Whither Marxism? At this stage Derrida’s theory of Deconstruction has made him into an academic star throughout the American University system, and it had been co-opted into a kind of apolitical theory of literary aesthetics that sat very comfortably with, for want of a better expression, American intellectual hegemony. But then events intervened with the collapse of the Soviet Union and Derrida took the opportunity to reconnect with the political. Much of Spectres is taken up with Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History, which vainly attempts to describe the victory of neo-liberalism as the only show in town after the collapse of Communism, and as history has shown was superseded, if not by the inadequacy of its analysis (Whither China?) then by those annoying things which Neville Chamberlin famously referred to as ‘events’.

But the lecture is also interesting in the way that Derrida suggests that Deconstruction came out of Marxism:

“Deconstruction has never had any sense of interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is to say also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.”

Derrida plays a lot on that notion of spirit, talking about how Marx tries at the beginning of Manifesto to dispel the idea of communism as a specter but also suggesting that Marx himself keeps using the metaphor almost obsessively when analyzing Capitalism. We can see how he alludes to it in the discussion of the wooden table as a commodity above. That he tries to suggest that his ideas are part of the spirit of Marxism per se rather than Marxism itself it because he hoping to distance himself from those who had concerned Marxism as a dogma:

If this attempt has been prudent and sparing but rarely negative in the strategy of its references to Marx, it is because the Marxist ontology, the appellation Marx, the legitimation (sic) by way of Marx had been so solidly taken over. They appeared to be welded to an orthodoxy, to apparatuses and strategies, whose least fault was not only that they were, as such, deprived of a future, deprived of the future itself.

Not only students then, spouting out Marxist phrases and frightening Granny at the dinner table, but groups, parties, governments, and latterly, when one includes the Soviet Union, empires. It was when the crimes of the latter became impossible to ignore by the Left leaning Western intelligentsia that a distancing from Marx himself occurred and his criticism of capitalism became buried within the competing literary and historical theories that echoed around the lecture halls without the slightest chance of being absorbed by the disaffected bourgeois students who dozily filled them.

So, writing in 1993 it’s important that Derrida reconnected with the political and decided to challenge the all too complacent acceptance of the ‘naturalness’ of our, so called, liberal democracies. Of course, his ideas were not without its critics on the Left. Most famously, Terry Eagleton, who called his reference to the spirit of Marxism as ‘Marx without Marx’, and Aijaz Ahmad, argued, according to Alex Callinicos in his obit of Derrida, that “Derrida seemed to be counterposing ‘a certain Marxist spirit’ to the actual Marxist tradition in its theoretical substance and political reality”.

But to go back to my friend in the Socialist Party, how many within that actual Marxist tradition, while dealing on a day-to-day basis with political reality, are actually aware of the theoretical substance which underpins it? How many of them are aware that the actual works of Marx are the bedrock of any serious critique of modern Capitalism. Derrida, while dancing with ghosts, has at least has gone back to the text.

Writing in the latest edition of The London Review of Books John Lanchester describes the ‘credit crunch’ phenomena and suggests that while the situation with Northern Rock came as a shock even to those who should have known better, it was complete bolt out of the blue for the ordinary elector:

“The ordinary elector knows almost nothing about how these markets work and the impact they have. Kynaston observes that under Communism children from primary school upwards were taught the principles and practice of the system, and were thoroughly drilled in how it was supposed to work. There is nothing comparable to that in the capitalist world.”

So, having read that, and reading in the Spectres lecture Derrida saying ‘very recently, I reread the Manifesto of the Communist Party. I confess it to my shame: I had not done so for decades – and that must tell one something’ I decided to pick up my copy of the Manifesto to pay my due to the founding thinker of Marxism, and to see if it provided any insights.

And indeed it did. But first to provide a little context. Yesterday, after avoiding all my RSS feeds for the Christmas period I gorged myself on them, wholesale. Of course, the beginning of the New Year brings with it the opportunity for newspapers to discuss the year past with ‘experts’ and to provide predictions for the future one. And it seems that the economy is on everyone’s mind. Or rather on the impending crisis in the economy. The chances of recession in the US due to fall out from the Sub-prime disaster was prominent. As Conor has mentioned the excess in the number of unoccupied housing developments has suddenly become an issue in the mainstream media.

Dark, fearful days indeed. We should be worried. We should be fretful. We should be thankful of what we’ve got, while we have it. But upper most, we should not resist our masters demands to cut our wages to try and maintain our nations much vaunted ‘productivity’, whatever that’s got to do with the price of bread.

So, having said that it was interesting to read this in Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto:

Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like a sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern production forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crisis a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had just off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other hand by the conquest of new markets and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crisis, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. p86 Penguin Classics 1985

So recessions, downturns, the wiping out of serious amounts of cash in an afternoon is not anything to worry about. Its just part of the system, an ability to create new opportunities when all available markets have been saturated and used up.

In 2007 Dublin Opinion went on a lot about the real housing situation in Ireland; about speculation and over production and how this was allowed to happen – using information that is readily available - and showing how certain parts of the media are actively aiding and abetting the distortion the situation in favour of those with the greatest interest in that market.

Although we have written about lots of other things sometimes it feels like the obsession of a crank – especially when very few people in the media have been making the same points. It’s encouraging then to read in Marx that an analysis of housing bubbles and the over production of property is at the heart of any materialist critique of modern capitalism. Considering how Ireland is so reliant on the construction sector a real materialist critique of the position of housing in the Irish economy is more important than ever.

Happy 2008!