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June 5, 2006
I 've always thought that Marxism was stronger on economics than politics and so I've been interested in the attempts to give the politics something more than the politics as class struggle. It has little to say about pressing cultural issues such as water politics or federalism or refugees and little conception of how the political might be different from the economic.
One attempt to give some substance to marxist conceptions of the poiltical in relation to the tradition of modern European political thought, has been the turn to Spinoza by French marxists (eg., Althusser, Macherey & Negri) to expunge the Hegelianism from Marx's work by replacing Hegel with Spinoza and so as to develop an alternative to Hegelian Marxism. My concern is with the political relevance of Spinoza today, and this very useful survey article by John Holland in Cultural Logic provides me with a way to assess the Spinozian turn.
Consider this passage:
Spinoza wanted to settle the question of the basis of human society, given that its feudal-corporatist basis had been thrown into crisis by the emergence of the market and the ideology of "possessive individualism." But he refused to consider that basis as somehow separate from human society itself -- either in the form of "natural rights" pre-existing, and then supposedly safeguarded by, the foundation of political society, as per the social contract theories of Hobbes and Rousseau; or in the form of transcendent Spirit and the ruse of reason, which merely use human societies to realize their own ends, as per Hegel. In contrast to Rousseau and Hobbes, humankind's natural state for Spinoza is neither un-mitigated war (Hobbes) nor solitary purity (Rousseau) but always already political: human beings always live socially, and that sociality is antagonistic except to the extent that humans realize (i.e. recognize and actualize) the superior force of individuals combined in cooperative groups relative to that of isolated individuals and those combined in uncooperative ones -- that is to say, human society is inherently and, as it were, aboriginally political. ....So for Spinoza, as for Hegel, the political precedes the personal, and thus cannot be conceived on the model of a voluntary contract among pre-existing individuals.
So far so good. This indicates that we have a reworking of the social contract tradition begun by Hobbes. Spinoza may have even opened up a different (continental?) strand within this tradition----Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Hegel?
But we then get a particular turn which I find so strange about this French marxist reading--it's blindness.
Holland says:
But whereas for Hegel, the political has a history (the History of subjective Spirit realizing itself objectively through peoples and the development of the State), for Spinoza the political exists immanently in history -- which is conceived as the (non-teleological) ensemble of realizations of natural-human powers. And whereas for Hegel, the supra-personal political instance is the transcendental subjectivity of Spirit, for Spinoza, it is simply natural force augmented by the equally natural but historically contingent combination of individuals in groups. Such combination produces a potentially infinite variety of socio-political forms in history, but always stems from the basic nature of human passion to knit interpersonal relations and form groups. Humans thus don't (have to) "give over" their natural rights to sovereign Power in order to safeguard their private interests and found political society: their interpersonal relations were already political to begin with, and their political force depends on how well -- how extensively, intensely, and harmoniously -- those passionate relations are composed. This rejection of social contract eliminates any need for transcendent authority (potestas), and instead grounds politics immanently (non-dialectically) in the force of the group (potentia multitudine).
What I find is the transcendental subjectivity of Spirit, by which is meant subjective Spirit realizing itself objectively through peoples and the development of the State. How is this squared with Hegel's Philosophy of Right and its critique of the social contract tradition.
That critique does not rely on idealism, in that the main actor or agency is Spirit or Mind; a transcendental subjectivism, in which this historical agent, Absolute Spirit, is a subject that transcends any and all concrete subjects and indeed history itself. The Philosophy of Right is a critical working through the categories of modern political philosophy and it places individual freedom at the very centre of the text.
From what I can make out from Holland's text there is no engagement wiith Hegel's Philosophy of Right by the Frenach marxists, even though that text is a classic of modern political philosophy along with Hobbes' Leviathan and Rousseau's Social Contract. They ignore it.
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