By MAURÍCIO VIEIRA MARTINS*
Commentary on the recently released book by Luis Felipe Miguel
In one of his Prison Notebooks Dedicated to the study of the philosophy of Benedetto Croce, Antonio Gramsci asks himself what is the most correct stance to take when faced with a theoretical adversary. Rejecting the conception that views scientific debate as a judicial process, the outcome of which is that “the defendant is guilty and must be removed from circulation”, Gramsci provides a theoretical and methodological indication full of consequences. He states that “the adversary’s point of view can indicate an aspect to be incorporated, even if in a subordinate way to one’s own conception”.[I]
Gramsci's warning came to mind while reading the book Marxism and politics: ways of using it, by political scientist Luis Felipe Miguel. Because what we find throughout his argument is an effort to debate and sometimes incorporate, when this is the case, those most relevant moments of a given theoretical position, even if it is not the one adopted by the author himself. There are several examples, but perhaps the clearest are those found in the parts dedicated to gender and racial oppression, respectively, chapters 3 and 4 of his book.
In them, Felipe Miguel debates with some currents of what has been called identity politics (of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity), a topic that generates the most bitter controversies within the left. His position is critical of identitarianism, whenever the “‘reification’ of identity imprisons its members, who must conform to the predetermined model of who they are” (p. 91). However, the author does not dismiss the undeniable relevance of the respective movements of groups subjected to different forms of oppression, since they “are, in fact, directed at defending rights and combating forms of domination and oppression that actually prevail in our society” (p. 90). Hence the proposal to articulate these specific struggles with a broader agenda of the left, including the structural issues of a capitalist society, such as the conflict between classes and the extraction of more value – which some identitarianisms tend to relegate to a secondary role –, the underlying configuration of the daily oppression experienced by workers.
But it is not only in the aforementioned chapters that this effort to capture the most productive vein of a given social movement or theory occurs. Also in the debate held on “Democracy, emancipation and capitalism” (chapter 6), Felipe Miguel notes that the “most elaborate critique of the type of consent present in the liberal tradition and crystallized in the electoral process, which takes the form of the obligation to obey, comes from an author who has little connection with the Marxist tradition” (p. 124, n. 24); and his reference here is the thought of feminist political philosopher Carole Pateman. This observation places him before the challenge of approaching the theme of social consent – which benefits conservatism so much – in a theoretical register that questions it more deeply, based on the tools present in the Marxist legacy.
However, this argumentative procedure should not be confused with a light eclecticism that randomly aggregates different concepts. The approximation between the different authors is made throughout the book only based on well-defined thematic axes and, as such, demands a work of conceptual re-elaboration. Furthermore, Felipe Miguel does not shy away from stating in so many words his disagreements with those perspectives that seem to him to be extremely mistaken and, as such, practically unusable. This seems to be the case of what is perhaps the most recurrent critical interlocution throughout the book: American political science, largely hegemonic in this area of knowledge.
This political science conceives of individuals as isolated social atoms, with analogous capacities for action and choice, which could be quantified and mathematized. Felipe Miguel reserves his harshest words for the errors of the violent abstraction operated by this discipline, which adheres “to formal models that operate in a historical vacuum, such as rational choice theories” (p. 181). In addition to its theoretical and methodological individualism, this hegemonic politology seeks to circumscribe a supposed essence of politics, which would be preferentially allocated to formal institutions. In the next step, everything proceeds as if political action existed above all in state institutions.
Against such arbitrary isolation, what the author does is to show the deep relationships between political activity (whether it occurs inside or outside formal institutions) and other dimensions of societal experience. Relationships that the titles of the book's chapters illustrate clearly. They are: (i) Politics and economy, (ii) Social classes, (iii) Sexual division of labor and classes, (iv) Capitalism and racial inequality, (v) The State, (vi) Democracy, emancipation and capitalism, (vii) Alienation and fetishism, (viii) Social transformation, (ix) The ecological question.
The scope of the subject matter covered by Felipe Miguel – strictly speaking, each of the aforementioned chapters would be enough to fill an entire book – can be interpreted as the presentation of a field of possibilities for the relationship between Marxism and politics, to be explored in greater depth through additional research. However, it is worth highlighting two aspects that are quite central to the proposed investigation. The first of these refers to the emphasis on the increasingly limited nature of so-called liberal democracy, which is celebrated in prose and verse throughout the world.
This limitation is due to the progressive withdrawal of economic issues from the political sphere: “regulation promoted by the market becomes immune to political control. […]. The establishment of the economy as a world apart allows the scope of democracy to be restricted. Thanks to this, societies that we accept as democratic coexist with highly authoritarian hierarchies in the sphere of production relations (or the domestic sphere)” (p. 33).
Therefore, it is worth remembering that issues related to, for example, the issuance of currency, the financial system, private ownership of the means of production, as well as control of the Armed Forces, all of these fundamental dimensions of the societal experience are beyond the reach of popular suffrage. And this occurs even in so-called consolidated democracies of “Western society”. In fact, we are facing a drastic emptying of popular sovereignty to the detriment of the minority class of the population that dominates the economic and political instruments that are decisive for the exercise of power.
A second central aspect of the book is, in my opinion, what the author calls a “liberal framing of social criticism”. Omnipresent in various media outlets, this framing is characterized by focusing on and operating on the most apparent dimension of the profound contemporary societal crisis. Emphasizing issues related to unequal access to education, corruption, income distribution and the oppression of certain isolated identities, this framing does not link them to the structural relations of a capitalist society.
A basic contradiction of the latter, the division into social classes appears in a very rarefied way in this conception of the world: “'Class', therefore, is a range of income and consumption” (p. 45). With this, the relationship with the means and production of the different classes is erased, which come to be conceived as a kind of continuum only quantitative, which does not allow us to visualize the expropriation suffered by the majority of the population.
In terms of the responses that such a liberal framing of the societal crisis advocates, it is worth highlighting “special attention to education, which a conventional discourse presents as the mechanism par excellence for upward social mobility. An illusory promise, since, as Bourdieu and Passeron demonstrated, school presupposes native skills of the dominant classes, which require a much greater effort to be absorbed by the dominated” (p. 86).
This liberal framing of social criticism ends up contaminating political segments that, in their origins, sought their theoretical guidance in Marxism. In Felipe Miguel’s assessment, this is what historically occurred with the defenders of “market socialism”, who progressively lowered their horizons towards a watered-down socialism (p. 148), with an emphasis on merely compensatory policies. To counter this perspective, the book’s chapters on social classes, alienation and fetishism offer elements for visualizing the power relations present in capitalist society.
Hence the warning that “the theme of fetishism is especially important because it bridges the gap between the critique of political economy and the critique of the whole of social relations under capitalism” (p. 140-141). In these relations, the formation of new subjectivities becomes increasingly important, which begin to function imbued with a liberal and highly competitive worldview.
As for suggestions for a possible development of the research, I believe that Marx and Engels' criticism of anarchists, and also of sectarian left-wing groups of their time, would provide additional elements for outlining the position of the founders of what is now known as Marxism. Historically, this conflict involved very tough controversies within the left, which revolved not only around the advisability or otherwise of participating in liberal institutions of representation, but also what the scope of the organization to be followed should be.
Just as an example, a reminiscence text by the old Engels from 1884 is instructive, where he recalls his and Marx's choice to raise the banner of democracy, because “if we did not want to join the movement at its most advanced point”, all they could do was “teach communism in a small provincial newspaper and, instead of a large action party, found a small sect. But we had had enough of preaching in the desert; we had studied the utopians too well for that”.[ii]
Similar questions recur throughout the history of the socialist and communist movement, although they are always marked by the specificity of each situation. Let us think of Vladimir Lenin and his Leftism, childhood disease of communism, written in 1920. One of the sections of this lucid writing is entitled “Should One Participate in Bourgeois Parliaments?” It is curious to note that, while Lenin answers the question affirmatively, armchair revolutionaries yesterday and today prefer the negative answer, and seek to convince the youth of the correctness of their purism. The result of this is a proliferation of micro-organizations that, although aware of capitalist contradictions, have a political effectiveness close to zero.
But today the predominant tendency on the left is probably another: the aforementioned downgrading of its political program. If in the history of European social democracy such accommodation occurred over a few decades, the Brazilian case has compressed its metamorphosis into an astonishingly shorter period. This downgrading deserves the clear repudiation of Luis Felipe Miguel, who emphasizes that “a large part of the left has left aside the issues of political economy, limiting itself to advocating compensatory measures for the poorest and channeling its utopian energies into items such as participatory democracy or multiculturalism” (p. 148).
Finally, and just by way of contrast, it is worth remembering that the poet Emily Dickinson, known for her sensitivity to metaphysical questions, once wrote that “The only news I know is Bulletins all day from immortality”, which could be translated as “The only news I know are daily bulletins of immortality”. On the other hand, for us, ordinary mortals, knowing politics both as theory and practice – however conflicting it may be – is an unavoidable and equally daily task. Luis Felipe Miguel’s book helps greatly in this understanding.
*Mauricio Vieira Martins He is a senior professor at the Department of Sociology and Methodology of Social Sciences at UFF. Author, among other books, of Marx, Spinoza and Darwin: materialism, subjectivity and critique of religion (Palgrave macmillan).
Reference
Luis Felipe Miguel. Marxism and politics: ways of using it. São Paulo, Boitempo, 204 pages. [https://amzn.to/3Woimhq]
Notes
[I] Antony Gramsci. Prison Notebooks: Notebook 10. Rio de Janeiro: IGS-Brasil, 2024, p. 58. We commend the recent initiative of IGS-Brasil in making the full text of the Prison Notebooks gramscians. Available here.
[ii] Friedrich Engels. Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung🇧🇷 Available here.
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