Marxist Individualism

To give the paradox an even sharper edge, we might say that the Marxist image of society is, almost by necessity, an inferential derivation from Marxist individualism, the "social" here being derived always from a prior notion of the bodily subject. The suggestion is not as outrageous as it might seem. It is not entirely fortuitous, after all, that Marx should be found, on at least one occasion, in the company of Emerson and Thoreau. And Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out some time ago that Marxism is a nineteenth-century philosophy "as much because of what it has inherited from liberal individualism as because of its departures from liberalism."^[46] That inheritance, I would argue, is less substantive than cognitive. The bodily subject is central to Marxist thought, in other words, not as a matter of thematic description but as a matter of inferential projection. It enables Marxism to make sense of the world by reflexively incorporating the world, fashioning it into an integral unit, and generalizing from body to person, from person to class, and from class to a totally "just" society.

Still, the notion of a "Marxist individualism" might seem like an oxymoron, since Marx (unlike Emerson and Thoreau) was on record as having rejected the individual as a legitimate category of thought. He had begun the Grundrisse , for example, with the acid remark that "the individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades." "The more deeply we go back into history," he said, "the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole."^[47]

When Marx went on, however, to imagine this "greater whole," when he tried to offer a historical survey of this "whole" as a counterpoint to the individual, the terms with which he did so turned out to be surprisingly individualistic, derived to a surprising degree from the physical attributes of the body. Thus, the "first form" of community as he envisioned it (an "initial, naturally arisen, spontaneous" development) also happened to be a "comprehensive unity." And since this "unity is the real proprietor and the real presupposition of communal property, it follows that this unity can appear as a particular entity above the many real particular communities," so much so that it "exists ultimately as a person .^[48] Similarly in classical antiq-

uity, the "second form" of human association: even though the community was no longer "the substance" integrating its members into "purely natural component parts," Marx noted with satisfaction that the city-state was still a "political body ," still a "presence," a "whole," indeed "a kind of independent organism."^[49]

As Marx's organic language suggests, the social for him—whether as historical reconstruction or (as I will argue) as dialectical forecast—turned out to resemble nothing so much as a physical body, a body integral and objective, imaged forth as a natural unit. And since this nonphysical "body" now stood to its physical counterpart not in a relation of discrepancy (as the medieval church once did) but in a relation of analogy, we might speak of the social in Marx as the effect of a metonymic entailment. The nonphysical body, in other words, took on all those attributes—the empirical objectivity as well as the corporeal integrity—which characterized the physical body. The latter, then, was not only constitutive of the former but fully descriptive of it, fully representative of its nature and disposition as a "whole." The logic of metonymy in this sense dispensed with the need to theorize about the social, for it was already accounted for, its defining features already immanent and inferable from those of a material given. And so it turned out that for Marx an immaterial phenomenon was imaged after the materiality of the corporeal subject, an entity objectified even as it was generalized.

Raymond Williams, in one of the most illuminating discussions of materialism I have seen, has singled out this generalizing logic as the central problem within Marxism. Materialism, Williams writes,

grounded on the rejection of categorical hypotheses of an unverifiable kind, and basing its own confidence in a set of provisional working procedures and demonstrations, finds itself pulled nevertheless towards closed generalizing systems: finds itself materialism or a materialism. There is thus a tendency for any materialism, at any point in its history, to find itself stuck with its own recent generalizations, and in defence of these to mistake its own character: to suppose that it is a system like others, of a presumptive explanatory kind.^[50]

The tendencies of materialism, so succinctly outlined by Williams here, are especially problematic (but also, in a sense, problematically utopian) when its generalizations are derived from the bodily subject, when its image of the world is founded upon the image of a

containable physicality. It was this odd compound of materialism and individualism—this projection of the bodily attributes of integrity and totality onto a historical canvas, as the ultimate attributes of human existence—that enabled Marx to imagine a just society as the organic issue, the natural given and the natural end, of the coming of age of the proletariat.

Marx's image of the proletariat was thus not so much that of a collectivity as that of an individual . Or, more accurately, we might say that Marx's image of a collectivity was in fact the image of an individual. If capitalism was that monstrous machine whose "parts are human beings," class was that integral body within which those human parts could once again be made into a political whole. "The proletariat" in Marx was the effect of a generalization, then, extrapolated from and imaged after what (following Marx and Engels) we might call the figure of the "abstract individual." Of course, the "abstract individual" was the very thing Marx and Engels set out to critique, in their attack on Bruno Bauer and, most famously, in the eleven Theses on Feuerbach .^[51] And yet it is possible to argue that this figure was never clearly foreign or antecedent to Marxism, that it was in fact the derivational ground for its historical projections:

Since the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete in the full-grown proletariat; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society itself in all their human acuity . . . it follows that the proletariat can and must free itself. . . . The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole of the proletariat at the moment considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is , and what, consequent on that being , it will be compelled to do.^[52]

What empowered the proletariat, then, was its particular mode of "being," its status as the "abstraction of all humanity," its agency being not only underwritten by but actually objectified within that integral character. It was this derivation of a historical necessity from an objective identity,^[53] and the projection of that objective identity upon a human collectivity, that made the proletariat a historical subject for Marx. And since that subject was a metonymic container for "all the conditions of life," the unfolding of which was "practically complete in the full-grown proletariat," there was also a sense in which this "full-grown" body would bring with it a unified "whole,"

a complete subsumption of differences. For this reason Marx wrote that even though "proletariat and wealth are opposites . . . it is not sufficient to declare them two sides of a single whole." Rather, he argued, "when the proletariat is victorious . . . it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property."^[54]

In this account of the birth of communist society, the proletariat not only eliminated its antagonist but, in the same gesture, eliminated itself as an antagonist and so ushered in a unified humanity, marked by its undifferentiated pristineness no less than by its dialectical completions.^[55] This image of an integral whole allowed Marx, in Critique of the Gotha Programme , to speak of revolutionary justice as if it were a natural issue, growing out of the development of a single body, the unfolding of a single life. Having gone through its difficult childhood (when it is "still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges"), this revolutionary "body" will grow into a state of maturity, Marx said, a state where justice will prevail as a natural condition of life and where "society [can] inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"^[56]

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs": this dream of commensurability—this exchange of effort and satisfaction—remains, even in the late twentieth century, one of the most compelling visions of justice. Still, its utopian faith—its faith that its two stipulatory clauses could somehow balance out, that its two prepositions, "to" and "from," would somehow flow in organic harmony—could proceed only from an assumption of wholeness, only by imagining the social body as if it were actually a physical body.

The Marxist dream of justice, as a dream of objective adequation, thus rested on what Louis Althusser would call a postulate of "philosophical fullness" as well as a postulate of "simple original unity."^[57] For Althusser, such postulates are sheer anathema, which he lays at the door of Hegel and, to some extent, the early Marx himself.^[58] What they amount to, he argues, is a blithely homogenizing principle, a kind of cosmic equation mark, liquidating all differences, making them all subsumable, all immaterial:

For the unity of a simple essence manifesting itself in its alienation produces this result: that every concrete difference . . . [becomes] no

more than "moments" of the simple internal principle of totality, which fulfils itself by negating the alienated difference that it posed; further, as alienations—phenomena—of the simple internal principle, these differences are all equally indifferent .^[59]

Against this "indifferent" epistemology, which turns all differences into epiphenomena, into secondary evidence, Althusser offers an elaborate defense, by painstakingly (and some would say casuistically) distinguishing the Marxist dialectic from its Hegelian precursor. Of course, the Hegelian legacy might be said to have influenced not only Marx but virtually every modern thinker, including Althusser himself.^[60] Still, the point remains that in making the immaterial a simple translation from the material—in making the former an epiphenomenon of the latter—Marxist epistemology would seem to have conferred upon the "indifferent" an analytic primacy, embracing it not only as its cognitive ground but also as its cognitive horizon. This reign of the indifferent might be seen, I would argue, not only as a consequence of Marxist materialism but, above all, as a consequence of Marxist individualism, dictated by its generalizations from the integrity and totality of the corporeal subject. Like an entire spectrum of nineteenth-century individualisms, Marxist individualism adduces signs of difference only to affirm the primacy of identity.^[61] Against this identitarian logic, then, against its ceaseless subordination of the differentiated, its ceaseless subordination of the nonintegral, I want to bring into focus one particular critique of Marx—initiated by Engels and elaborated by Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and most recently Anthony Giddens—a critique directed at his subordination of the nonintegral in one especially crucial category, the category of the "social."