Marxism without Revolution: Towards a History of Discouragement

Abstract

Marxism without Revolution: Towads a History of Discouragement David R. Shumway Carnegie Mellon University Any comparison of Marxism with religion is a two-way street, in which the former is not necessarily discredited by its association with the later. —Fredric Jameson (1981) Fredric Jameson has asserted the need for a theory of discour-agement. I will leave the theorizing to him and follow instead another Jamesonian command, the one that says, "always historicize." I will argue, however, that our present discouragement is not rooted especially in any current conjuncture—though I do not wish to deny that recent events have been especially discouraging—but rather in something like the "longue durée" of the intellectual and Marxism. In other words, my basic argument is that discouragement is built into both the politics and social position that we have inherited. By "we," I mean practitioners of cultural studies and other left-wing or liberal intellectuals—not just Marxists—who I will claim continue to understand their political role much as Marxism has defined it. There are two conditions that have come to define the critical intellectual as always already discouraged. One of these involves the role of critic or interpreter that intellectuals have historically defined for themselves and the countervailing desire to have an impact on politics, or what has come to be called in recent theory, agency. The other involves the failure of history to conform to the Marxist prediction of revolution or even to the liberal faith in progress. Here a broader concept of historical agency is thrown into question, as the working class failed to achieve its world-historical mission. I will suggest that these two conditions are related, and that they combine to produce a sort of paralysis, a pessimism of the will despite Gramsci's formula. As Zygmunt Bauman has shown, Western intellectuals have constituted themselves in the space between two opposing identities, the interpreter and the legislator. The interpreters are the more numerous [End Page 30] party, and when we speak of intellectuals, we normally mean this group. As interpreters, intellectuals have placed themselves outside of the political process except as producers of critical discourse. This has allowed them to remain independent of government and often even parties or interest groups, save their own. The legislators, on the other hand, sought to enact their ideas by joining the government. Those who did so successfully found themselves facing the need to compromise the critical positions that they developed before becoming part of the state. As a result, their identity as intellectuals came into question, while their actual activities seldom resulted in what seemed to them significant change. While the interpreters refused to engage in actual governance, they like the legislators nevertheless characteristically expressed a class identification. Bauman argues that The world of the intellectuals was politically divided. They threw in their lot with one or the other of the class opponents engaged in a bitter conflict for the power resources of the state. Each choice, however, was argued and legitimized in terms of the hope that the selected class would desire, and be able, to create or sustain a society comfortable for intellectual pursuits; a society that admits in practice the centrality of specifically intellectual domains (like culture and education) and the crucial role of ideas in the reproduction of communal life. (147) This puts intellectuals in the position of facing predictable failure regardless of which class they embraced. The bourgeoisie consistently refused to create a society that regarded intellectual life as anything other than marginal, while the working class could at best offer a promise to change that state of affairs. As result, we can say that intellectuals have constantly experienced the discouragement that comes from not only the failure of their critique to bring about social change, but also from the from the sense that society regarded them, not as dangerous, but irrelevant. But why did intellectuals come to believe that they could change the world? While a complete answer would take...