Marx’s Nightmare: Marxism, Culture, and American Politics

Marxism—as a body of thought, a method of analysis, and an orientation toward the social world—always has had a vexed relationship to culture. Even now, when world financial crisis and worldwide protest can arguably confirm Marx’s best insights, there remains a question about how useful Marxism can be in helping us comprehend contemporary cultural developments.

On the one hand, Marx brings to the study of culture the valuable structure-agency dialectic. He treated social relations as organized by a structure of domination. He saw those relations and that structure as historically produced, and therefore argued they required reproduction through coercion, through what we once called ideology, and through politics. But he also argued that men make history, albeit not in circumstances of their own choosing. That is to say, he held out the possibility of apprehending and resisting domination. The insistence on domination and on the weight of historical determination—but twinned with the insistence on resistance, possibility, and invention—seems to be the systole and diastole of Marxism’s beating heart. It is this “dialectic”—between structuring determinations and creative agency—that offers an alternative to theoretical approaches that emphasize either determinism or voluntarism. A “Marxist” orientation also means analysis of the specific historical transformations of “capitalism” and resistance to it, by way of “class struggle.” Working within this framework, Marx’s followers have analyzed modes of production and logics of accumulation, uneven development and imperialism, the production of culture, the formation of the state, and moments of systemic crisis. In these ways, any aspect of culture is embedded in structures of unequal power and “modes” of producing life.

On the other hand, Marxism’s vexed relationship with “culture” (and, I would add, “politics”) arises partly because “bourgeois” and “proletariat” were, for Marx, non-culture categories. They were instead anchored in the objective world, self-evident and carrying (within them) an inherently unifying “class interest.” Marxism thus tends to reduce symbolic life to a mere “reflex” (distorted or true) of an underlying “material” life, as if the symbolic and material could be separated into a sequence. Symbols and customs are endowed with functions, not meanings. A problem arises, however, because human beings do not act as they are supposed to, according to the class interest and rationality attributed to them. From its beginnings, Marxism has had to deal with a bourgeois class fractured or gone missing, and with a working class gone awry, captured by racism, nationalism, ethnic rivalry, or identity politics. To register the enormous power of ideas to distort the perception of true circumstances, Marxism invented a concept of ideology, and repeatedly asserted a theory of false consciousness, displacement, and compensatory politics. In that vein, Marxists in the United States made use of a widely prevalent theory of “American Exceptionalism” to explain why—thanks to ethnic division, an ethos of immigrant mobility, and hegemonic individualism—workers did not conform to the normative (European) model of politics, in which class consciousness was articulated in a labor party and social democratic politics. Yet the very waywardness of actual politics and history—not only in the United States but everywhere—has triggered fruitful efforts to revise how “Marxism” conceives the idea of culture.¹

Three central criticisms of Marxism have emerged and have recurred. First is the issue of causality: theorists question the assumption that the social and historical express an underlying causal logic and a teleological dialectic. Second is the issue of language: theorists question the assumption that a “material” reality precedes and determines representations, which are always and only epiphenomena but never constitutive. Third is the issue of rationalism: theorists question the assumption that collective actors rationally apprehend and pursue inherent and self-evidently common interests.

In each regard, theorists have proposed alternative assumptions: first, social relations and historical development are contingent artifacts of politics, not of historical “laws,” social “logics,” or “rationalities” (un)consciously enacted. Second, human beings are “symbol animals” who “live in language,” whose inter-subjective reality is symbolically mediated all the way down; accordingly, there is no “material” life independent of or prior to language, collective...