Blanchot, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Levinas, and Lyotard

Adam Haig's essay "Steiner, Brenner and Neo-Marxism: The Marcusean Component" International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) Neo-Marxism and post-modern Marxism

The intellectual line of development of neo-Marxism, including its petty-bourgeois politics and non-dialectical materialism, has made it assimilable into the reactionary subjective idealist school of post-modernism, whose leading representatives include Blanchot, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Levinas, and Lyotard. Critical theorists like the American academic Fredric Jameson, for example, are on the borderline between the neo-Marxists and post-modernists. Steiner and Brenner are not too far from this borderline social milieu.

"By the 1990s, critical theory had expanded in meaning from the original Frankfurt School work to represent a broader body of scholarship in post-modern, post-colonial and cultural studies. [. . .] The Frankfurt School had been transformed from a relatively obscure network of scholars to become an influential school of thought on the margins of the academy," says one commentator. [54] Neo-Marxism has turned into post-modern Marxism, or, in the more fashionable academic terminology, post-Marxism.

It is outside the scope of this essay to address post-Marxism in any detail. Suffice it to say that when Ann Talbot and Chris Talbot speak of "Steiner's light-minded approach of picking up books and ideas as and where he can," and continue, "His theories are a melange of such objets trouvés [found items]. He is always eclectic, ungrounded and erratic. His work reveals a mind in chaos. The one theme that binds it together is a constant hostility to objective thought and resistance to its liberation from the authority of dogma," [55] their characterization could as well be applied to Slavoj Zizek, a leading figure in post-Marxism.

Despite Zizek's formal criticisms of post-modernism, an article in the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Zizek Studies describes him in the following terms: "Slavoj Zizek represents the new post-modernist left in all the energy and conceptual audacity of its effort to formulate strikingly new concepts and boldly go where we could not as long as our thought was hedged in by the need to preserve the guarantees. Zizek is (arguably) the most important theorist on the left today." [56] The Slovenian philosopher sits on the editorial board of the journal named after him.

Zizek, who is not unlike Steiner and Brenner in their Utopian project to synthesize Marcusean psychoanalysis and Marxism, combines Lacanian psychoanalysis and something that passes for Marxism. This eclecticism is seen in the book that launched Zizek's name, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), which is prefaced by the political opportunist Ernesto Laclau, co-author with Chantel Mouffe of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). Zizek is a haphazard and pretentious thinker, and his politics leaves much to be desired. He is not a Marxist.

This does not mean neo-Marxism and post-Marxism are synonyms. Zizek, in his rambling postface to Georg Lukacs' Tailism and the Dialectic (2002), criticizes the Frankfurt School for its tradition of "almost total absence of theoretical confrontation with Stalinism." The school maintained "the official mask of its ‘radical' leftist critique" and did not acknowledge its solidarity with liberal bourgeois democracy, as that would have deprived the critical theorists of "their ‘radical' aura." [57] But it is precisely this pseudo-Marxist aura that both the neo- and post-Marxists share.

Ironically, Steiner claims that "feelings of ‘party-patriotism' will blind many members and supporters" from seeing "the [Socialist Equality] party's abstentionism and estrangement from the working class," and that "the SEP's theoretical degeneration" has been laid bare in Marxism without Its Head or Its Heart. [58] Steiner has a very low opinion of the ability of SEP members and supporters to seriously think through theoretical, political, and historical questions.

In relation to the historical development of Marxism, it is especially important to note Steiner and Brenner's denunciations of Georgi Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism. Their attack on this outstanding theoretician is another example of their contemptuous attitude toward the heritage of the Marxist movement. Steiner and Brenner would have their readers believe that their assessment of Plekhanov is in keeping with Lenin's critique of the leaders of the Second International in the aftermath of the outbreak of the first imperialist world war in 1914. Nothing could be further from the truth. Steiner and Brenner's repudiation of Plekhanov's theoretical work reproduces not the attitude of Lenin and Trotsky, but that of the petty-bourgeois intellectuals of the Frankfurt School. Notwithstanding Lenin and Trotsky's bitter opposition to Plekhanov's politics after 1914, the co-leaders of the Russian Revolution continued to view him as a great Marxist theoretician.

Steiner began his series of attacks on David North by denouncing the latter's appraisal of Plekhanov's theoretical work; however, Steiner conveniently ignores what the Bolsheviks wrote about the Russian Marxist. Steiner and Brenner say that "Plekhanov's version of the dialectic was superficial and fatally flawed," [59] and that he was a "mechanical materialist who believed in the inevitability of socialism emerging as a result of the maturation of objective conditions." [60] But Voronsky, writing in 1920, explained that "Plekhanov completely mastered both the spirit and method of Marx's teachings. Under his pen the revolutionary doctrine became animated with all its flexibility, profundity and merciless severity." [61]

Aside from the falsification of history undertaken by Steiner and Brenner, the fundamental substance of their allegations is that the ICFI has adopted Plekhanov's "objectivism" and that "dialectics is a dead letter" in the ICFI. [62] For the record, the Marxist party does not create mass working class struggles. The inevitability of revolutionary events is the outcome of the structural contradictions and crisis of capitalism.

Steiner and Brenner's criticism reproduces the basic objections of the Frankfurt School to the Marxist insistence that objective social being determines subjective social consciousness, that social revolution is the historically determined outcome of objective socioeconomic processes, and that the principal pedagogical task of the revolutionary party is to develop within the working class a scientifically grounded understanding of capitalist society and the class struggle. The attack on "objectivism"—whether of Plekhanov or, for that matter, North—is, in essence, a rejection of historical materialism.

The era of social revolution develops out of the objective situation. Through no fault of their own, workers do not spontaneously develop socialist consciousness from objective conditions. The political consciousness of workers is, however, radicalized by the force of the objective, that is, by the material and economic. As Marx said, "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." [63] Material life has a material impact on consciousness, and thereupon arises social opposition by the workers themselves.

This has been seen, for example, in the courageous but limited struggle of the 250 laid-off workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, Illinois. When the company folded up, the workers occupied their factory for six days, beginning on December 5, 2008, winning wages and benefits they were legally entitled to. The mass social struggle in Greece is also testimony to the self-action of the working class. When Athens police murdered fifteen-year-old student Alexis Grigoropoulos on December 6, Greek society exploded with tens of thousands of students, youth, and workers taking to the streets nationwide in protests, strikes, and battles against armed riot police. The ongoing struggle is fundamentally underlain by deteriorating social conditions in the midst of the world financial crisis.

The Marxist party fights for an independent perspective—an understanding of the nature of the objective situation and its revolutionary implications—political authority in the international working class, and the tasks that will confront workers in the era of social revolution, in the era of the workers' self-emancipation. As a revolutionary mood begins to develop among workers, intellectuals, and youth, they will utilize internet and communication technologies to organize their struggle; they will become increasingly aware of the presence and interventions of the World Socialist Web Site and the ICFI; and they will determine on their own if the ICFI is the party and leadership that defends and serves their class interests.

In closing, the psychodynamic Utopianism of Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory has had a profound impact on the political orientation of Alex Steiner and Frank Brenner. Both men provide sufficient indication of their departure from revolutionary Marxism and materialist dialectics into the realm of neo-Marxist subjective idealism and the post-Marxist borderline. Their assertions cannot be taken seriously on political and logical grounds. There is too much middle-class radicalism, too much impatience, too much reductio ad absurdum, and too much that is foreign to Marxism in their entire line of argumentation.

Notes:
1. Alex Steiner, "Unable to Answer Our Political Criticisms: The WSWS Resorts to a Smear Campaign," Permanent Revolution, 9 November 2008.
2. Frank Brenner, "To Know a Thing Is to Know Its End: On Why Utopia Is Crucial to a Revival of Socialist Consciousness" [PDF], May 2003, Permanent Revolution.

3. Leon Trotsky, Results and Prospects, Marxists Internet Archive, 1996.
4. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966) p. 7; italics in original.