By LUIS FELIPE MIGUEL*
Author's introduction to newly published book
Karl Marx's work left its mark on a large number of fields of knowledge. He was a philosopher, but became an economist. He is one of the founding fathers of sociology. Along the way, he revolutionized the science of history. Marxism — a label he did not like — evolved into a multitude of divergent currents and readings, contributing in different ways to these and other scientific disciplines (law, anthropology, geography, linguistics, etc.). And it’s not just Marxists who feed on Marx’s ideas. They laid many of the foundations of scientific practice in the humanities.
Thomas Kuhn said that the so-called “social sciences” remain in the pre-scientific stage, since they do not have any paradigm that is shared by all practitioners; each time, we have to justify our fundamental theoretical choices. Without discussing here the potentialities or limits of Kuhn's understanding of scientific work, it is worth noting that such chaos is linked to the more immediate political implications of social science, which thus suffers greater pressure to fulfill a role of ideological legitimation. But one can say, without fear of making mistakes and against Kuhn himself,[I] that all social science worthy of its name is based on some materialist conception of history and is, to some extent, tributary to Marx's thought.
Having outlined this picture, what is the position of political science? It is certainly the humanities discipline in which the penetration of Marxist ideas was (and still is) most difficult, for reasons linked to its own formation as a field of knowledge. Political science is an American discipline that has expanded throughout the world, reproducing this matrix.
The need to distinguish itself from sociology (which is explained, at least in part, by the territorial fights in the academic world) encouraged a strict focus on formal institutions, separating them from broader social processes. It also encouraged an inordinate appreciation for stylized models, largely drawn from neoclassical economics, which, in one fell swoop, strip agents of their character as historical products and sponsor the fetishism of empirics. The result of this is that the mainstream of political science adopts a naive epistemology, which leads to the survival of positivism and allows the popularity of bizarre perceptions, such as the “rational choice theory”, which constructs political actors in a historical and social vacuum.
All of this leads to the common mistake of labeling as “partial” approaches committed to transforming the world, but as “neutral” those that accept it as it is and project its permanence ad æternum. Nothing could be further from the tradition inaugurated by Marx.
Another birth feature of political science is its position as an auxiliary discipline of the State. A science that, from the beginning, placed itself ex parte principis, that is, seeing its object of study from the point of view of the rulers, not the people. Its ambition would be to increase the efficiency of current mechanisms of domination. Of the political economists of his time, Marx said that they were “the scientific representatives of wealth”[ii]; Political scientists, then, could be defined as scientific representatives of power. Even today, political science demonstrates this inclination by privileging themes such as “governability” or the conditions for the effectiveness of government policies — although, it is necessary to recognize, in a less univocal way than in the past.
Thanks to the ahistorical character of most of its models, it can take current structures as simple “data” and cover its own conservative and legitimizing character with the colors of axiological neutrality. Political science is therefore far from the emancipatory character that Marx wanted to give to his own theoretical endeavor. When Antonio Gramsci, prison notebooks, condemned sociology as a bourgeois positivist science and praised political science as the true path to understanding the social world, he was talking about an earlier phase of sociological thought. And also from a completely different political science; he uses the expression to designate the tradition of realistic understanding of power processes, inaugurated by Machiavelli, not a nascent American discipline[iii]. In disciplinary political science, the critical and anti-positivist approach remains against the grain.
I pointed out how the inaugural traditions of political science made it unreceptive to the contributions of Marxism. But there is an alternative reading that also deserves consideration, according to which it was Marxism itself that showed little attention to politics. A provocative text by Norberto Bobbio, which caused great debate when it was published, responded negatively to the question that served as its title: “Is there a Marxist doctrine of the State?”. The view that politics is just a part of the “superstructure” that reflects a certain social base, that is, that it is nothing more than an epiphenomenon of deeper conflicts, would have led to the underdevelopment of Marxist thought in this field.
Added to this is the tendency, present in much of Marxism (especially, but not only, until the last decades of the 1968th century), of theoretical isolation, preventing its fertilization by other currents. In the text, Norberto Bobbio ironizes Umberto Cerroni, who, in a XNUMX book, described C. Wright Mills as a “great sociologist” and granted Max Weber the modest status of “attentive observer”. Therefore, Marxists' reflection on the State and on politics in general ends up condemned to, many times, simply rediscovering (and translating into their own jargon) what many others had already said before.
Norberto Bobbio's reading was contested by Marxist authors, who pointed out it as biased and selective.5 But it is not possible to deny that the founding works of Marxism grant politics a limited role and, in fact, see in it above all the reflection of deeper structures. There is a contrast between the sensitivity to the specificity of the political, present in the works in which Marx discusses concrete historical processes, and the insufficient theorization when he works at a more abstract level.
Although authors can be indicated who, from within Marxism at the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, presented a more robust discussion on politics (as is the case, through different paths, be it Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin , whether by Eduard Bernstein), only in the post-war period, with the publication of Antonio Gramsci's work, was there a significant leap in Marxist reflection on politics.
What I propose in this book is an introductory examination of the usefulness of Marxian categories or those born from the Marxist tradition for the production of a political science more capable of understanding the social world — and, perhaps, also of guiding action within it. I am, therefore, aligned with Gramsci's position: it is about seeking a discipline that reflects more its primitive inspiration, in the work of Machiavelli, and less its institutionalization, from the last years of the 19th century, in the American academic environment.
The proposed path is not just to view “Marxism as a social science”,[iv] which suggests something like its normalization and incorporation into the dominant theoretical-methodological aspects, but keeping it as a tensioner of the discipline. The addition provided by Marxism, as well as by other currents with an emancipatory project (feminism, decolonial studies), is a theory focused on current patterns of domination whose horizon is the production of a new society. A mutilated Marxism of the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach — the one that says that the question is not to interpret the world, but to transform it[v] — loses its distinctiveness.
This tension becomes more necessary the more it becomes clear that political science is going through a crisis of relevance.[vi] Institutionalist myopia has led to successive “surprises”, situations that completely escape the explanatory capacity of the dominant models in the discipline. The most important of these is the current crisis of democracy, described by conventional political scientists as the sudden and unexpected outbreak of “populism”, which destabilizes liberal-democratic regimes. There is a pronounced inability to understand the connection between broad societal processes and the functioning of political institutions. I believe that Marx and Marxism have a lot to contribute on this point. Indicating some of the ways in which this contribution is necessary is the ambition of this book.
In the first chapter, I discuss the method of historical materialism and the relationship between politics and economics. In political science, there is a tendency to isolate politics as a separate world and produce models that ignore, almost deliberately, what happens outside its borders. Against this, I argue that two movements are necessary (and that Marx can contribute to both).
The first is to understand that the very definition of political boundaries is a historical product and a result of conflicts between different interests. This helps us avoid reifying them, as the majority aspect of the discipline does today. The second movement is to reconnect the understanding of politics with the broader social disputes that permeate it. Without this, the study will be restricted to petite politician, that is, to the conflict of egos and the dispute for positions, nothing more than the ripples of deep social clashes. A reading of historical materialism that sees it not as an economic determination, but as the overdetermination of different social practices, which allows simultaneously refusing the autonomy of politics and preserving the effectiveness of the political moment.
Then, in chapter 2, I discuss the concept of “social class”, which Marxism, as we know, places at the center of its reflection — as Marx and Engels say in the Communist Manifesto, the history of humanity is the history of class struggle. The concept is controversial, never having been fully developed by Marx himself; and, within the left itself, many point out that the exclusive focus on class leads to the obscuring of other sources of social oppression.
In the dominant tradition of political science, on the other hand, class is at most a secondary element. Economic inequality tends to be treated only as relating to access to income and wealth, ignoring production relations. And the fundamental division of society is seen as being between rulers and ruled: this is the path of elite theory and James Burnham's reading of Machiavelli. However, concern with class conflict (which does not mean establishing it as the only relevant axis) is fundamental to expanding the understanding of political processes and integrating them with broader social dynamics.
But recognizing the relevance of class conflict does not exhaust the question of its relationship with other axes of domination present in the social world, such as gender or race — a discussion that takes place in chapters 3 and 4. As a reflection of the intellectual activism of many researchers, The field of political science has, in recent times, become more sensitive to the importance of these categories. On the left, the openness to such themes from the 1960s onwards, thanks mainly to the feminist, black and youth movements, has been followed, in recent times, by an “identitarian” turn (an expression I use to specifically designate the tendency to affirm the group belonging, detaching it from social structures of domination).
While post-war reflections dialogued with the Marxist tradition, tensioning it and forcing it to renew itself, identitarianism privileges a liberal and idealist grammar, establishing itself in a field opposite to historical materialism. It becomes necessary, then, to understand what Marx and Marxism still have to contribute to these discussions. Chapter 3 mainly analyzes the relationship between gender and class; o 4, between race and class.
The debate over the concept of “State” is the theme of the fifth chapter. Marx’s work tends towards a profound stylization — the “steering committee” of the general interests of the bourgeoisie, according to the The Manifest —, which corresponds to the need to combat idealistic perceptions of the State as a promoter of the common good. His historical writings once again reveal a more complex understanding; and the struggle of the dominated made the situation even more thorny, since States began to act, often, against the express will of capital and other privileged groups (with legislation protecting labor or promoting gender equality or racial, for example).
In the second half of the 20th century, when the mainstream of political science seemed willing to dispense with the category “State” in favor of the more diffuse notion of “political system”, it was Marxist authors or those influenced by Marxism who maintained it and built a sophisticated theoretical body to explain it, without losing any view its class character. The recognition of the class character of the State, which this tradition has never abandoned, allows us to critically question the somewhat flat institutionalism that marks much of the discipline.
A specific type of political regime, democracy, has long become the normative horizon of political science — and chapter 6 discusses what Marxism can contribute to understanding it. It is, above all, about breaking with formalist views, which disconnect democratic institutions from social conflicts and present them as a neutral field (the “rules of the game”) in which disputes are regulated. Although one can hardly speak of a “Marxist theory of democracy”, Marxist authors have introduced important debates to understand it in a more complex way, as a form of political domination that is closely related to general social domination, to reinforce it or to moderate it.
The seventh chapter shifts attention to the production of social behaviors, discussing the controversial concepts of alienation, fetishism and ideology. The utilitarian maxim that each person is the best judge of their own interests, which underlies most political science models, is confronted by the understanding that the social world is not transparent and that the dissemination of one or another reading about This world is the object of an unequal struggle.
At the same time, however, the perception that the dominated are victims of a false consciousness can lead to paternalistic and authoritarian stances, as if the external observer, but equipped with the correct analytical tools, was capable of determining what the “true” interests are. of agents better than the agents themselves. Even so (and in this, once again, Marx and Marxism provide precious tools), it is not possible to seek an in-depth understanding of political disputes without thematizing the social production of preferences, for which the dominant have far more powerful resources than the dominated.
Social transformation is the theme of the eighth chapter. Marx's writings sometimes give rise to a deterministic interpretation, as if at some point the capitalist mode of production became incapable of resolving its own contradictions and had to necessarily give way to another form of social organization. At the same time, however, there is room for human agency; After all, “the emancipation of workers will be the work of the workers themselves” and the engine of history, according to the famous cliché, is the class struggle.
At a time when the main instrument of political struggle that emerged from the Marxist tradition, the class party, seems to be struggling in an insoluble crisis, it is worth asking what Marx and Marxism can still offer for the understanding of social change — and what kind of future society they project, in the face of the historical failure of real socialism (the experience of the Soviet bloc) and a deep-rooted disbelief in relation to the “communist hypothesis”.
The last chapter introduces an issue that, from Marx's time until now, has moved from the margins of political debate to occupy its center: ecology. For a long time, Marxism was linked to productivist views, which praised the growing “dominion of man (sic) about nature”. The perception is reinforced by the poor record, in relation to environmental protection, of the countries that claimed or still claim the heritage of Marxism, the countries of “real socialism”.
Against it, contemporary authors seek to present a different reading, sometimes making Marx himself an ecologist before la lettre. More important than that, however, is understanding how a materialist approach, inspired by Marx, can help understand the challenges posed by environmental degradation and its connection with social conflicts.
Finally, the brief conclusion takes stock of these contributions and presents what would be, in my opinion, an ideal result. Not a “Marxist political science”, which affirms a doctrinal affiliation beforehand, but a political science open to the contributions of Marxism, whether in its analytical tools or in the problems it discusses — and without fear of, following in these footsteps, taking a position and seeking to contribute to social transformation with an emancipatory character.
* Luis Felipe Miguel He is a professor at the Institute of Political Science at UnB. Author, among other books, of Democracy in the capitalist periphery: impasses in Brazil (authentic). [https://amzn.to/45NRwS2]
Reference
Luis Felipe Miguel. Marxism and politics — ways to use. São Paulo, Boitempo, 204 pages. [https://amzn.to/3Woimhq]
Notes
[I] Thomas Kuhn, “Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?”, in The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1977) [ed. bras.: The essential tension: selected studies on tradition and scientific change, trans. Marcelo Amaral Penna-Forte, São Paulo, Editora Unesp, 2011]. The original article is from 1970.
[ii] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family (trans. Marcelo Backes, São Paulo, Boitempo, 2003), p. 71. The original edition is from 1845.
[iii] Antonio Gramsci, prison notebooks, v. 3: Machiavelli. Notes on the State and politics (trans. Luiz Sérgio Henriques, Marco Aurélio Nogueira and Carlos Nelson Coutinho, Rio de Janeiro, Civilização Brasileira, 2000), p. 330-1. The manuscripts are from 1932-1934. Gramsci extracts from Machiavelli above all a realism oriented towards what should be, not as a freezing of a
[iv] Here I evoke the title of the book by Adriano Codato and Renato Perissinotto, Marxism as a social science (Curitiba, Editora UFPR, 2012).
[v] Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the german ideology (trans. Rubens Enderle, Nélio Schneider and Luciano Cavini Martorano, São Paulo, Boitempo, 2007), p. 353. The original manuscript is from 1845-1846.
[vi] It's not new. An article published half a century ago, entitled exactly “Marxism and political science”, presented data that showed that the vast majority of political scientists believed that the discipline was superficial and irrelevant. The author observed that, despite this critical feeling, political scientists continued to reproduce the same trivial models, due to the lack of tools that were capable of overcoming them. Marxism, he said, could provide such tools. See Bertell Ollman, “Marxism and Political Science: Prolegomenon to a Debate on Marx's Method,” Politics & Society, v. 3, no. 4, 1973, p. 491-510.
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