A Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique

by Daniel Bensaïd, Gregory Elliott (Translator)

Without denying the contradictory character of Marx’s thought, Daniel Bensaïd sets out to demonstrate that it was not a philosophy of the end of history, an empirical sociology of classes, or a positive science of economics positing an inexorable progress towards an ineluctable communism. Instead, Marx’s ‘critique of political economy’ encompassed three great critiques of the scientific and political canons of its age—of historical reason, sociological rationality and scientific positivism—which make the thinker from the nineteenth century fully relevant to the twenty-first century of global capitalism. Indeed, we find here a ‘post-postmodern Marx’ able to inhabit a contemporary world replete with contingency, emergency and contradictory temporalities.

Published in France on the eve of the strikes of 1995 that signalled a profound revolt against la pensee unique , Marx for Our Times is an invitation to rediscover our foremost contemporary, Karl Marx.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Economics, Nonfiction, Theory

410 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Daniel Bensaïd was a philosopher and a leader of the Trotskyist movement in France. He became a leading figure in the student revolt of 1968, while studying at the University of Paris X: Nanterre.

Reviews

[Tiarnán · Rating 4 out of 5]

I began this with trepidation, since I have gradually but consistently moved away from both French theory and more traditional Trotskyist interpretations of Marx. The first couple of chapters where he engages critically with Analytical Marxism didn't do much to assuage my trepidation, since he repeats a lot of the dialectical hand-waving that is the bane of Hegelian interpretations of Marx. However, as I read on I grew to appreciate Bensaid's style, and his particular methodology.

This book is not a powerpoint lecture on the ABCs of Marxism, it's more a French-style "lecture" where the author adopts a determinate standpoint (the three volumes of Capital + the Grundrisse, essentially, but also earlier philosophical works where necessary) or subject matter (Marx's thought, in all its contradictions) which he then applies to a number of contemporary and historical debates, in an improvisational, interpretative, manner: Marx and Hegel, Marxism's complex relationship to positivism and productivism, and the intersection of Marx's thought and contemporary debates surrounding the philosophy of science and ecology are all key touch stones.

What I was convinced by was the following couple of points:
1) You need to read all three volumes of Capital to understand Marx's theory of class, production, reproduction, or anything else - they operate at different levels of abstraction (production, circulation, reproduction, respectively), yet each implies the other in a circular or inter-dependent manner.
2) Marx's debt to Hegel was never paid, and rather than a 'break' the transition from the philosophical works to the mature critique of political economy should be conceptualised as a continuous journey.
3) Despite the Stalinised maiming of Marx's thought, a revival of Second International progressivism, Marx himself cannot be placed in the dock for its crimes. If there is a productivist, teleological, determinist, positivist, non-scientific, moralistic, etc. Marx (to summarise the wide variety of sometimes contradictory accusations thrown at the old mole, which Bensaid is responding to, normally in their most contemporary, sophisticated, French mode) there is also always the precise opposite: an anti-determinist, anti-positivist, ecological Marx, whose viewpoint can be excavated through critical engagement rather than dismissal or anachronistic projection. This is bound to happen given the depth and breadth of his writing.
4) In this vein, the final chapter on political ecology is something of a minor masterpiece.

Excellent book, definitely not an introduction to Marx and very heavy - densely philosophical and quite 'French' in its construction and context - at times, but worth reading for anyone interested either in the philosophy of Marx, or a good example of 'Capital-centric Marxism' i.e. using the categories and concepts of Capital (surplus-value, accumulation, profit rate) to grapple with novel or important historical questions, rather than an often vulgarised 'Marxism'.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book has three parts, or critiques: Marx's critique of Historical Reason, Marx's critique of Sociological Reason, and Marx's critique of Scientific Positivism. The first two parts largely deals with criticism of other writers on their topics, and the third part is largely theory.

The critique of Historical reason mostly focuses the difference between what is necessary and what is certain. Marx is often accused of historical teleology: Communism as inevitability. Bensaïd carefully walks through Marx's work to show this is not true. "Necessity and contingency refer to what is possible," in his historicist perspective, not what is certain:

Normality and rationality are always partial and provisional, permanently subject to confirmation. There is nothing to say that the supposedly ‘'normal' or 'rational' is guaranteed a future. Even incomplete, normality remains normality, and poses the problem of its criterion. If God is indeed dead, and science does not dictate moral standards, only two solutions remain. Either the judgement of History returns surreptitiously to pronounce the closing words of the fable; or a class standpoint determines 'its' norm in self-referential fashion. In this instance, we are dealing not with a transcendental normality but with an immanent rationality giving expression, in the mode of strategic choice, to a desirable state of affairs that is simultaneously an optative necessity and an effective possibility.

The last hypothesis seems to accord better with Marx’s problematic.

The critique of Sociological Reason is largely about the concept of class, and what exactly Marx meant by it. It turns out this is hard to do:

If we must hit upon a definition of classes at any price, we should search (and search hard) for it in Lenin, rather than Marx:

'Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social income of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it.'

And finally what is being called here the critique of Scientific Positivism. I think this section was the most informative of the three, and speaks well for itself:

Wresting Marx from his Hegelian roots to install him in the normality of modern science is a nonsense. His 'scientific' practice, disconcerting in many respects, makes him the 'original metaphysical author of his own positive science', 'a scientist who evinces the unusual peculiarity of being the author of his own metaphysics, a general and explicit vision of reality'. Marx's initial internal rupture with the dominant image of science—his characterization of political economy as 'infamy' in 1844—would have remained sterile without the Hegelian rejuvenation of 1858.

Contrary to what Sacristan claims, this 'return' does not, for all that, signify a definitive transcendence of 'critique' in the direction of 'German science', a variety of general epistemology or rationalized metaphysics. Its preservation in the subtitle of Capital bears witness to an unresolved theoretical tension. Marx remained torn between the fecundity of positive science and the persistent dissatisfaction of dialectical knowledge. 'Critique' makes it possible to reconcile the two. Was this a bad compromise, or healthy resistance restraining instrumental reason on the slope of its own fetishization?

Good question. But there's also this:

If it is no longer a question of merely interpreting the world, what is at stake? Changing it, of course. Marx sometimes seems to anticipate philosophy becoming a science, as if the positive certainty of the Enlightenment was due to prevail conclusively over the obscure uncertainties of hermeneutics. His preface to Capital thus begins by paying homage to the natural laws of physics, but concludes by emphasizing the polemical character of knowledge as a social product: 'In the domain of political economy, free scientific inquiry does not merely meet the same enemies as in all other domains.' A prisoner of earthly constraints, this free inquiry remains, in accordance with heroic images of science and scientists, squarely on the battlefield, where it encounters 'the most violent, sordid and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest'. Scientific in a certain sense and to a certain extent, the critique of political economy is thus condemned to confronting the ideological illusions of opinion, without itself being able to escape the snares of fetishism completely. It evokes and calls for the subtleties of a future 'organic mechanism', the undulating knowledge of an ordered disorder—in short, a different way of doing science.

So who or what is a Marx For Our Times? Bensaïd does not actually directly broach the subject, but what he presents is a Marx that has been rescued from his detractors, particularly Western Marxist ones who choose certain aspects they wish to surgically extract, often thereby exorcising important contexts. Another aspect might also be recognizing Marx's own historical context (which include the likes of Hegel, Spinoza, Liebniz).

[Akasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cette note n'est pas une approbation de ses nombreux péchés

[Chelsea Szendi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marxists of the world! Before you proclaim yourself entirely post-Marxist! Read this book to remind yourself why reading Marx in a post-1989 world is exciting, and why it's okay to hate Karl Popper and analytic Marxists (and why there is no more need to compromise).

The age of vulgar Marxism is over, and Marx is back in style.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal contribution to the canon of Marxist literature.

[Marginalia Σημειώσεις στο περιθώριο]

Ο Darren Roso παρουσιάζει όψεις της συμβολής του Ντανιέλ Μπενσαΐντ (1946-2010) στη μαρξιστική συζήτηση του τελευταίου τρίτου του εικοστού αιώνα: https://marginalia.gr/arthro/o-marx-t...