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Fredric Jameson
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Fredric Jameson – philosopher, literary critic and Marxist political theorist. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Political Unconscious, and Marxism and Form. He is currently the director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University, USA.
1. Which aspects of Marxism's theoretical legacy definitively belong to the past? Which aspects still seem urgent today?
I don’t think of it like that, in terms of what’s living and what’s dead in Marxism, as Croce said. It seems to me that Marxism is reinterpreted at each moment of capitalism, and I believe that we’re now in a third moment of capitalism, after Lenin’s moment and after the original one, in which Marxism is reinterpreted on a much larger scale than it was in the Leninist period. I do not understand Marxism as Marxism-Leninism. I understand Marxism as the analysis of capitalism, and I’m always amused when people say that capitalism has triumphed and Marxism is dead, because Marxism is the analysis of capitalism. The Marxist economists today are the only ones who are looking at the system as a whole. If you look at bourgeois economists they’re interested in specific local problems of capitalism, inflation, investment, and so forth, but not the system. Marxist economics is the only one that looks at the system, so I don’t think of it in terms of anything in Marx being outmoded. It seems to me that Marx made a model of capitalism as a system and that it is still valid, except that capitalism exists on a much larger scale than it did in his day. On the other hand, Ernest Mandel has argued that since Marx is making a pure model of capitalism, a thought model, of which England is only an incidental reference, in a way his model is more accurate in terms of the current global system, because this is a far purer capitalism, one from which feudal elements have been eliminated far more thoroughly and in which commodification, wage labor, and so forth are far more extensively developed than they were in the older period.
2. Which are the main theoretical problems that Marxism needs to solve at present?
I think there’s a range of theoretical problems. The most obvious one is the labor theory of value and the relationship to technology, the relationship to computer production, and how the labor theory of value can account for the value that's produced by computers. Then I would say that in our period the theory of commodity fetishism, which seems to me was secondary in the Leninist period. It was never absent, but it was not the dominant of the Marxism of that age of imperialism. I think that today commodity fetishism is a primary phenomenon of capitalism. And this is why what used to be called culture, or the cultural factor, or whatever, is now really central to all left politics, or at least the left politics of the first world. So those are some fundamental changes. The way in which one analyzes the image and the relationship of the image to commodification is an important theoretical problem. The way in which the theory of ideology is to be understood today is an important theoretical problem that some writers and philosophers have dealt with.
Then also when one comes to politics – and, of course, Capital was never really a politics – the crucial question is the twofold one of organization and unemployment. It seems to me that the political forces that need to be organized today are the forces that are structurally unemployed. Consider how in globalization the whole continent of Africa, for example, is being allowed to go down the drain, or how in almost all of the advanced countries the flight of industry and the transfer to information technology has left masses of people unemployed. Of course, in our country, it’s a matter of race and it’s black people, people who will never be employed. How does one organize that? Because classical organization was based on workers, not on the unemployed, and this is a very serious new kind of political problem. And along with that is the question of the party. Because nobody seems to want to go back to the Leninist party. If one looks at Lenin’s own time and his own experience, the Bolshevik party was much more democratic, and right up until October Lenin was in a minority in the Bolshevik Party, and so there was a lot more argument in that party. But, on the other hand, it was a party that was not representing exactly, but was standing in for a class that scarcely exists anymore, namely this peasantry, who had their own ideologues of course, but were not really represented by the Bolsheviks. So the question of the party and the ideological resonance that the party has had since Stalin is an important political problem, and I don’t think it’s solved. This is my major disagreement with Toni and Michael with Empire. I don’t think that you can just say “we don't need the party and let's just have this explosion of the multitude happen wherever it happens,” “we don’t want to conquer power,” and so on. It seems obvious that the power of capital is so enormous that there must be a counter power to this, there must be some force that is capable of standing up to the forces and the immense money that capital has now in a situation where there hasn’t been a war in fifty or sixty years, a real world war, that would destroy all this capital and leave the businessmen much shakier than they are now. So the question of organization really is a crucial political question. Marx didn’t theorize all that, so this is in a sense not a matter of a part of Marxism that belongs to the past, but it certainly is a major theoretical question of politics and of political action. I think it’s also the case that this is a transitional period towards the world market, and one of things that characterizes this inevitably is the uneven development of all these countries. And uneven development means that the working class, such as it is these various places, is unrelated, so that American workers are fighting things like ecology, because ecology means doing things to American plants that will throw them out of work. While in other countries I think the struggle of labor is completely different. I suppose that one of the major labor forces in Korea is the steel industry, which is probably one of the biggest in the world. And the American steel workers are all out of work. So you have an unevenness of labor interests that would have to be somehow overcome for there to come into being a world labor movement. And a real left politics is not really possible until there’s some reorganization of the labor movement on a global scale. And that’s not something that we can bring into being by thinking about it. This has to happen and will happen by the way in which globalization flattens everything out and produces crises of a global nature. But it’s very ironic that although globalization is a force in every country in the world, one of its effects is to produce this unevenness of all these countries, which prevents common interests.
The question of the relation of Marxism to post-modernity, including culture and art, I think is an important one. I don’t think that we’re going back to what political art was in the modernist period. But on the other hand, I think that a lot of post-modern art, which in the beginning we thought was decorative and so on and so forth, is – and I would say that this is going on here – more and more political, or I should say wishes to be more and more political. But how does it do it? That’s one of these theoretical questions and has to do with the nature of this new culture and what it’s meant for art. But that may be another question.
3. Who are the most significant Marxist thinkers of the last decades, in your opinion? What is the significance of their contributions in the development of Marxism?
The significant Marxist thinkers fall into the series of problems [I’ve just described]. Althusser is important, above all as a theory of ideology, which was really a whole new notion of how ideology functions and a kind of setting aside of the notion of true and false consciousness. Which is not to say that false consciousness doesn’t exist anymore. It obviously exists. But since the end of the cold war, ideology has functioned in a very funny way. It’s become much cruder. In the cold war, all kinds of bourgeois ideologies had to appear, had to seem progressive. Now nobody needs to be progressive, and ideology is simply what the crudest vulgar Marxism always said it was, namely, money interests. And what corresponds to that – and I think this is an important unanalyzed theoretical problem – is cynical reason. There Zizek has been interesting – and that’s why I would include Zizek in this list – but not conclusive. How is it that everyone knows what capitalism is today? You don’t have to have false consciousness about it, rather they know it and they do it anyway, Zizek says. So I would say Althusser, Guy Debord and the Society of the Spectacle, and the whole notion of the image and the spectacle and the simulacrum. In Germany, the “Capital Logic” group was very interesting. And they have reemerged – those things have just been reprinted in Germany. That’s a kind of application of Hegel to Marx, but I think it means things that weren’t really discussed in the old days: the whole structure of Capital – the book, as a whole, rather than just looking at Volume One – and its relationship to the Hegelian dialectic. Obviously Lefevre has produced an immense body of work, and the relationship to space is really important. I don’t know that any of these people have had definitive responses, but the important thing is that they posed new problems. In Germany, I would say also Robert Kurtz. Is he known here? His is the idea that modernization is over, the third world will never modernize, this whole system is producing a kind of permanent instability that will cause it all to collapse. I think this is a very important and timely kind of idea, but people don’t want to hear this message because it’s too gloomy. David Harvey, in the United States, has also been important for theoretical stuff, but I think there are a lot of things being done in Marxism today. There’s a new group, the “Historical Materialism” group. Do you know that group, in England, and their journal? I think they have about 10 or 12 issues now. It’s probably the only recent one that deals with theoretical problems with Marxism as such, and prints essays on value, and the analysis of this and that, unlike New Left Review, which is more generally political. I’m probably forgetting a lot of important people, but those are a few from Althusser’s generation down to younger people. It’s true that in the United States there’s a lot of competition from a general identity politics standpoint, politics of difference, a kind of anarchism. I would say that in the general left the anarchist positions are stronger than the Marxist ones, that is, in general ideological tendencies, I don’t mean what you officially adopt. But probably that was always true among intellectuals. And I think there’s an interest in Marx, and, just like you, younger Americans are reading Marx and are very curious about it an so forth.
4. How would you describe your relationship to the problem of dialectics in Marxism?
I’m trying to work on this. It depends. If you identify the dialectic narrowly – with either Hegel or Engels or Stalin, the classic diamat or something – then this all looks very distant. But it seems to me that the dialectic is something more subtle or more complicated, and I think anywhere you find interesting thinkers, you find a dialectical process. And that needs to be described, but it’s very complicated philosophically. We need to redescribe what the dialectic is and show its presence at work in all kinds of thinking that would not officially call itself dialectical. One needs a different relationship to some of the thinkers, even those who say they’re anti-dialectical – that would be Foucault and the post-structuralists generally – because they seem to have a very narrow idea of the dialectic. Most of them associate it with the communist parties in those countries – Negri, Deleuze, and so forth – and they attack it on that basis. But it seems to me that when their own thought is interesting – and it often is – it’s dialectical. Because the dialectic means uncovering these deeper processes and showing contradictions at work. I suppose the most vocal opponents of the dialectic – and here’s another theorist I should mention – are Laclau and Mouffe. Laclau has made a beautiful description of the way politics works on a daily basis, but his attacks on the dialectic are not really, in my opinion, pertinent to a philosophical description of the dialectic.
5. In the 1990s, there was a widespread opinion that the contradiction between labor and capital was no longer the principal conflict of contemporary societies. Is this something you would agree with?
If you mean the position of workers, then workers are certainly more exploited than they ever were. Because the whole process today in our country is to lower workers’ wages and to make them give back benefits. The kind of welfare state that we had, which was not much, the whole effort is to undo that. In most countries in the West, and maybe here, the effort is to do away with the social services, to lower them in so far as is possible, and so forth. The contradiction between labor and capital is certainly the classic way of talking about this, but I’m not sure I would. Certainly exploitation is very much present and more and more present in the processes of production today, and that’s true whether we’re talking about information production, information technology, or industrial. The interest of capital has always been to increase surplus value and profits and to reduce the strength of labor, and this is still very much going on. Clearly that’s still the principal conflict of capital, but the other one that’s very important, as I said, is this structural unemployment. And that’s something that does not get dealt with in the labor theory of value. Then of course we haven’t mentioned the whole business of what Marx himself called immaterial labor and general intellect. Their idea, their political idea, which was I think probably part of the general Italian trend, was to show that it is not just industrial workers who are the proletariat, but really everyone who shares in this larger culturation that Marx called general intellect, in English, in the Grundrisse, and therefore that more people have an interest in the revolutionary transformation of society than this dwindling population of factory workers. On the other hand, I think that there are a lot of theoretical problems to be dealt with here, and I’m not sure that this little offhand page or two in Marx is enough to do that. And also I think this is an essentially first-world matter, because in other societies, where there’s still production, or where the sweatshops have moved from the first world, while there may be immaterial labor, it’s material labor that’s the crucial thing. Immaterial labor is very much a post-modern concept, and therefore it demands the kind of alert and suspicious scrutiny that any post-modern concept or analysis demands. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it’s just that those analyses are not always made from an economical or political standpoint. But certainly the exploitation of labor is essential to capitalism. I mean that’s what it’s all about.
6. Which points of connection between Marxist theory and mass labor movements do you see today?
The crucial thing is for those involved to build mass labor movements. In the United States, they’re very much threatened. There are always small groups of radical labor in the larger labor movements, but the American labor movement has been characterized by a general compromise with capital and this is its tradition. There, I suppose, Lenin’s analysis is still valid. That is, Marxism comes to the labor movement from the outside and from the intellectuals, and that means all the good things that it might mean and all the bad things that it might mean. It’s obviously not a healthy thing. The labor movement itself is concerned with wages and working conditions and services and so forth, and Marxism is the analysis of the larger system in which this labor is taking place. I suppose, in that sense, Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness is not correct, in that it is not from the standpoint of industrial workers that one really sees the truth of the system as a whole. On the other hand, I think he is right about commodification, but then that’s another complicated issue. Now whether the intellectuals see that either is another matter and I think that our motives, our class interests, are always suspicious and always depend on personal histories, and that they are in some sense always linked to the labor movement, because middle class intellectuals – and that’s what an intellectual is – are positioned in such a way that they could be beyond, they could be independent of their own immediate class interests, but they do not – except for personal or ethnic or gender reasons – necessarily have the standpoint from which to see society as a whole. I don’t want to say that this is a generational thing, but it is a historical thing, in which intellectuals suddenly realize that a system is not a healthy thing to be connected to, as artists or as thinkers. And they sense that there’s something else going on, there’s another current going on in parts of society that they should be connected to. And then you get a sort of movement of intellectuals towards these more progressive tendencies. But that’s unlikely to happen unless society is changing, and I think there are signs that this is happening. Society must be more evidently in crisis, and there’s certainly signs of that in the Western countries. So the analysis of intellectuals in general is a complicated matter.
7. How can Marxist philosophy exist in the bourgeois university? Could you tell us about your experience in this regard? How can a bourgeois state agree to the presence of Marxism in the kind of "ideological state apparatus" (Althusser) as is the university?
I think it very much depends on the discipline that you’re in how your political, ideological, philosophical views are tolerated. Those of us in culture – nobody cares about that. [Laughter]. If business wants to buy some of culture, they do it. Just like your shows here, your galleries, and so on. And if they’re interested in intellectuals, then they can buy pieces of your work. But if you are in economics…. In the sixties they hired Marxist intellectuals again, because the students wanted it, but they don’t have to do that. Political science is a little bit different, because after all there was the wave of the sixties and there are older guys now from the generation of the sixties who are in positions of power in some of these departments, and they resist the right and right-wing intellectuals in political science and in philosophy and so forth. But American philosophy, I mean analytical philosophy, was never interested in these things. So any kind of left philosophy – philosophy as such – was just as little likely to get a hearing in American philosophy departments as anything else in the history of philosophy, Kant or whatever. So, I think, as I say, it very much depends on the nature of the disciplines. Now, we were fortunate in the humanities, because after all we discovered theory, we propagated, in the United States, French theory, post-structuralism, because structuralism and post-structuralism were unthinkable without a Marxist background. And so we propagated all of that. The philosophy departments didn’t teach this stuff, so we could teach Hegel, or Marx, or anything we wanted. And nobody was policing us from any other standpoint, except for people who believed in pure art, or art for art’s sake, and the greatness of aesthetics, and so on, and we sort of easily took care of them.
It’s on those kinds of forces that this question depends. The question of how free one is in a specific situation to be a Marxist or to work with Marxism or whatever very much depends on the discipline. And now right-wing movements and right-wing intellectuals have more of a say and more power than they ever did, which isn’t to say that they amount to much. I mean people like Strauss suddenly reemerge as a potent theoretical force, whereas twenty years ago nobody paid any attention to Strauss at all.
But business is moving into the university more and more. There’s a privatization of the university going on. And the university is thus tempted to do whatever business wants. But that’s important in technology, in the sciences, in agriculture, and so forth, but less for us. Maybe in political science. But, on the whole, I think it is wrong to attack academic Marxism, the way EP Thompson did (the anti-structuralism stuff, the anti-Althusser stuff, the “Poverty of Theory”). EP Thompson was, from our perspective, nostalgic for a period when non-academic intellectuals played a role. And I think in the United States today there are very few of those, and most intellectuals are connected, and have to be connected, with the academy. There’s no independent journalism. They have to get their salaries from the university system. And the university system was prodigiously enlarged in the 1960s. So really it touches on all classes in society now. That’s still the political place in which radical intellectuals have to work I think. And that also conditions what can be done and what can’t be done.
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