A keynote presentation was given by Vijay Prashad on January 10, 2022, as part of the Kunsthalle Wien lecture series titled Partisan Cultures: Weapons of Mass Creation.1 In his energetic talk, Prashad makes a somewhat rote critique of the concept of universality, associating the term with bourgeois idealism. The gist of his use of the term is that universality naturalizes particular ideas and values as eternal and unchanging. It is ironic that what has now become a common post-structuralist critique and rejection of universality should have Marxism as its usually unacknowledged source. One of the scenes in Raoul Peck’s The Young Karl Marx (2017) sketches an important pedagogical scene. The young Marx is determined to undermine bourgeois ideology and thinks that what makes bourgeois society tick is religion. His new friend, the son of a Manchester industrialist, tells him that the true religion of the bourgeoisie is money. This sets Marx off on a course that eventually finds him at odds with the leading socialist thinker at that time, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, whose politics of wealth redistribution is criticized by Marx for its poor philosophical grounding. In contrast to contemporary theoretical approaches that reject universalism along with humanism, modernity and Enlightenment, Marxism has always provided a critique of universality but never rejected universality altogether. In the history of modern ideologies, it is fascism and the conservative anti-Enlightenment tradition that rejects universality. While Marxism has a historical dialectical materialist critique of bourgeois Enlightenment and philosophical idealism, it understands Enlightenment and the transcendental break as necessary means to move beyond the pre-modern metaphysics and religious superstition that sustained the ideological remnants of a decaying feudal order. Enlightenment philosophy was revolutionary in its time, becoming conservative by the mid-nineteenth century and decadent by the late nineteenth century. This historical understanding is today undermined by ahistorical and reactionary rejections of everything universal, European and modern.
The degeneration of postmodern theory in today’s shrill attempts to fight climate change through petty-bourgeois moral exhortation prevents the activist left from appreciating the simple but important meta-political differences between communism, liberalism and fascism. In his Sociology of Marx, the leading French Marxist intellectual of the twentieth-century, Henri Lefebvre, provides a useful description of universalism through the prism of the theory of ideology. According to Marx and Engels, Lefebvre writes, ideologies have six notable characteristics. First, while the starting point for Marxist theory is reality, reality is grasped in partial and fragmentary ways. The totality of the world therefore escapes consciousness because the conditions for consciousness are limited and limiting. Second, the conditions of reality refract (rather than reflect) reality through the already existing ideology, which is privileged by the dominant order. Old ideas stand in the way of new ones and cannot solve today’s problems. Third, despite these limitations, the dominant ideology is nevertheless part of historical development and lays claim to the totality of consciousness. This totality, whatever its false claims to represent all of social existence, conditions social practices. Lefebvre makes a general observation about all ideologies:
“Ideologies operate by extrapolating the reality they interpret and transpose. They culminate in systems (theoretical, philosophical, political, juridical), all of which are characterized by the fact that they lay behind the actual movement of history. At the same time it must be admitted that every ideology worthy of the name is characterized by a certain breadth and real effort at rationality. … Every great ideology strives to achieve universality. The claim to universality is unjustified, however, save when the ideology represents a revolutionary class during the time it serves as the vehicle of historical interests and goals with genuine universal significance. This was the case with the middle class in the period of their rise to power.”2
To put things in basic Marxist terms, socialism seeks to sublates the contradictions of bourgeois ideology. It does not, as would an ahistorical decolonial theory of praxis, which unwittingly repeats many of the motifs of Romantic anti-Enlightenment, simply reject modernity and universality.3 This leads Lefebvre to a fourth point: ideologies have a general, abstract and speculative dimension. This dimension is representative of concrete and material realities that are determinate of limited or partial interests. Ideologies seek to provide a comprehensive view of the totality that reinforces specific interests. Ideology critique is therefore a practice of demystification, or cognitive mapping, of these specific interests that are shrouded in ideology. Ideologies, Lefebvre says, are ignorant of their imbrication with social practices and do not understand the concrete totality that conditions their own presuppositions. Ideologies have no sense of cause and effect with regard to their own action on the world. Ideologies thus play an instrumental function in the struggles between social classes, class fractions, nations, and one would add today, identity groups. The function of ideology is to hide the true interests of social groups from themselves, thereby falsely universalizing the particular and making this particular into the universal.
Lefebvre adds two more points to this process. Fifth, because ideologies have a spontaneous basis in reality and social practices, ideologies are never completely false. Ideology, according to Marx, should not be conflated with lies, myths or utopian illusions. Ideologies that represent particular class interests can lead groups towards practices of deception. One thinks for example of the way that Stalinists rejected correct scientific principles, or cultural developments, on the basis of their association with ‘bourgeois’ society. As a member of the French Communist Party, Lefebvre knew about this because his own work, which was too ideologically Marxist for even the Comintern, was often censored or distorted. His point is that any ideology can produce valid insights, even if it is partial. Marxists for example say that the only bourgeois news source that consistently tells the truth is the Financial Times. The validity of an ideology, Lefebvre argues, can only be assessed retroactively, not by fudging the results, but post facto with the aid of critical thinking. Marx and Engels gave “the German ideology” as an example of this by arguing that a provincial and relatively backward country at that time produced speculative innovations that eventually informed all of political theory, culture and science.
Lefebvre’s sixth and last point distinguishes between ideologies and concepts. Universality, for example, is a concept and not an ideology. Fascists reject universality because it stands in the way of concepts like the organic community or the master race, which make arbitrary and false differences between groups into political absolutes. Concepts, Lefebvre says, which are the product of scientific abstraction, become integrated into praxis. Concepts limit and encourage specific forms of practice. Ideas do not have power by themselves. Ideas are only related to power by the people and social classes who make use of those ideas. Whatever ideas become part of the most elaborated ideology shape culture and society. By supplying new concepts and vocabularies, ideas become part of social consciousness. While consciousness is aware of the alienation involved in contradictory social processes and partial truths, and history often advances through its “bad” side, there is no social change that is altogether unrelated to the struggle over ideas. Ideas do not have magical power. They do not possess human minds from without, but rather inform the practices that relate to lived reality. Ideologies thus mediate social practice and consciousness.
The words that we use and the things that we do can limit consciousness. The term that the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács used for this is reification. Lefebvre writes: “An individual member of the middle class is not necessarily malicious or stupid, but he is incapable of rising above the mental horizon of his class. His outlook is formulated in the medium of language, which moreover is the language of society as a whole.”4 Rather than language, we could refer here more broadly to culture. Culture is never wholly autonomous but is a repository of the ideas of a society, including its partial truths and errors. Culture cannot simply be dissolved into the world we know, which is capitalist reality. In a capitalist society, all of culture is commodified, even when the culture takes the form of hyperreal signs, digital information or desublimated forms of social practice. However, culture can be situated in relation to class struggle. For Marxists, alienation implies consciousness of the division of labour and of relations of exploitation. Capitalized culture cannot be isolated from the history of social struggles. Its abstraction as autonomous form is a representation of the society that produced it. This means that no matter how ideologically partial a work of art may be, it contains within it the history of social struggles. This is what Walter Benjamin meant when he wrote that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”5
Today, we are told that because socialism is not a genuine option, because it is associated with the universality of Enlightenment modernity, we can only advance social struggle through the “barbarism” of identity conflicts.6 However, unlike socialism, identity politics cannot make a claim to universality. When they do, they must resort to macro-political tendencies. Since fascism rejects universality, identity groups must choose between capitalism and socialism. If one examines the descriptions of faculty researchers in any North American university department of political science, sociology or cultural theory, one finds there that the long march through the institutions has provided “liberal” and “democratic” society with the diversity that has been mandated by the neoliberal culture and knowledge industries. Gender and race issues are amply represented. Look there for signs of left-wing ideology, socialism, Marxism or communism and you will be sorely disappointed. Among leftists, you are likely to find a specialist on new social movements, which most of the time implies someone with an anarchist, grassroots or pragmatic orientation, which dovetails nicely enough with the NGO “third sector” and the kind of countercultural leftism that enhances the lifestyle concerns of the Professional-Managerial Class. There is a significant fault line in the cultural politics practiced by today’s PMC. The attack on universality that is nowadays performed by postmodern scholars and activists is very often, and only, nominally anti-bourgeois. What is usually implied by “bourgeois” in these cases refers less to the Marxist critique of political economy than to traditional bourgeois values and lifestyles that have long ago gone the way of the dodo. One conundrum that this has produced is the irony that the focus on postwar petty-bourgeois lifestyle changes, which has historically allowed the PMC to impose its style of life on others, is no longer allowed if it is found to insult one’s non-Western colleagues. For the sake of the new “barbarism,” one must not only abandon the socialist cause but a genuinely liberal one as well.
The idea of culture that is today promoted by advocates of decoloniality is more Western than many care to admit. As Terry Eagleton says about the idea of culture that was created at the time of the industrial civilization, the more impoverished life became, the more an ideal of culture and organic society was promoted instead.7 The point of this for Marxists is not to be conservative in matters of culture. However, when we are told by even capitalists that culture matters more than politics, pluralism provides a mystical gloss to political dogma. Diversity, Eagleton argues, is compatible with social and class hierarchy. One reaches a higher level of difficulty on this issue when decolonialists reject the mandated diversity of the neoliberal elite and argue instead that the working class must show solidarity by sacrificing its meagre privileges for the sake of randomly associated minority groups and causes. A genuine solidarity of international struggles cannot proceed on the basis of such moral exhortation. A stronger left ideology, with universal implications, is required to advance politics beyond the narcissism, and indeed, the barbarism, of small differences. The blackmail of identity politics is the making of identity interests as the most ideologically salient and determining. However, by making personal experience the measure of politics, reality is de-socialized and relativized according to incommensurable standpoints. The difference between this postmodern malaise and Marxism is that the class perspective has a claim on universal social transformation that identity politics, by itself, cannot provide. That the class struggle never takes place without affecting and being affected by other aspects of social structure – as evidenced by what is now developing as a proxy war in Ukraine – does not imply that socialism is falsely universal. However, one will never know if one has ceased to struggle for a world beyond capitalism. Meanwhile, we are asked to accept barbarism within actually existing neoliberalism as the best of all possible worlds.
Notes
1. Kunsthalle Wien, “Partisan Cultures: Weapons of Mass Creation – Keynote Vijay Prashad,” YouTube (January 10, 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-RFlX-tm4A.
2. Henri Lefebvre, The Sociology of Marx, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Pantheon Books, [1966] 1968) 70.
3. See for example, Theory from the Margins, “Walter D. Mignolo / The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (Theory from the Margins),” YouTube (November 22, 2020), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDEEbVcxmRU.
4. Lefebvre, The Sociology of Marx, 73.
5. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 256.
6. Endnotes, “Onward Barbarians,” Endnotes (May 2020), https://endnotes.org.uk/other_texts/en/endnotes-onward-barbarians.
7. Terry Eagleton, Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016) 22.