The new Marxist culture that emerged in the United States from about 2010 has many merits. It is particularly concerned with empirical reality and focused on tactical and strategic questions. It displays thereby a healthy scepticism toward theory, especially toward anything that smacks of Hegel, Sartre, Lukács or the Frankfurt School. Its maîtres à penser (to the extent that it acknowledges them) are Wright, Przeworski and to a slightly lesser degree Burawoy. Kautsky lurks in the background as well. The basic outlook of this group is a kind of simplified rational choice or ‘analytic’ Marxism. In this worldview there are classes whose members have material interests deriving from their position in a system of property relations. The success or failure of left parties depends on the degree to which they appeal to working-class interests so defined. One syndrome that preoccupies the new Marxism is the tendency of centre-left parties to pursue something called identity politics instead.
A key question, however, is rarely asked: what does ‘material interest’ mean? On closer inspection the term takes on a peculiarly metaphysical and timeless quality. Interests are said to ‘derive’ from property relations, without any further specification. But this is an essentially unreal way of understanding them.
Marxism must not forget that ‘members’ of classes are people, and people live toward their future as they understand and imagine it. It is thus a fundamental error to base one’s politics on an appeal to a given status – a present state of social being – and the interests supposed to flow from that. For an anthropologically well-grounded politics entails the attempt to mobilize groups and classes around a project to realize a future that is possible for them under a given set of determinant historical circumstances. Interests are ‘material’ to the extent that they emerge from those objective circumstances; they are ‘interests’ to the degree that they are oriented toward a horizon. Marxism thus cannot be, in Labriola’s wonderful phrase, ‘una filosofia del ventre’ (a philosophy of the stomach).
This raises the question of how horizons are constructed. One crucial way is through a process the new Marxist materialist metaphysics says relatively little about: class struggle. Grasped materially and dialectically, classes do not have a priori interests about which they subsequently struggle. Rather, class struggle is fundamentally about which futures are, and are not, realizable in present conditions, and it is only in that prospective context that material interests acquire substantive meaning. It makes little sense to say that a serf in thirteenth-century England had an interest in socialism. However, it might have made sense to say that a steel mill worker in nineteenth-century Germany had an interest in socialism, because it was among the possible futures embedded in historical reality.
In a sense this is the other side of another characteristic tendency of Anglo-American analytic Marxism: its attempt to develop a critique of capitalism by listing its ‘harms’ – the negative counterpart to interests. But ‘harms’ are only politically relevant if they are linked to historical alternatives. The capitalist harms that Wright lists in the opening pages of Envisioning Real Utopias, for example – inefficiency, a systemic bias toward consumerism, environmental destruction, limiting democracy and so on – do not constitute a critique of capitalism because many could be applied to any form of social production, including socialism.
The general methodological point is that to speak of interests in the absence of alternatives – imaginable and viable futures which are themselves historically constructed through struggles – is to speak of something unreal and abstract as if it were real and concrete. Worse, to endow an entity called ‘material interests’, so conceived, with causal power over living individuals who are their bearers is a theological claim. This kind of materialism has capsized into the worst form of idealism: an idealism that misrecognizes itself.
Read on: Dylan Riley, ‘Real Utopia or Abstract Empiricism’, NLR 121.