Marxism and Emancipation: An Interview with Dr. Asad Haider
Asad Haider is Assistant Professor of Politics at York University, a founding editor of Viewpoint Magazine, and the author of Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (Verso Books, 2018; reprint: Mistaken Identity: Mass Movements and Racial Ideology, Verso Books, 2022). More recently, he has published several essays and articles that examine questions of emancipation and identity politics through the critical framework of Marxism. I sat down with him to talk about political action and outcomes, the legacy of Marxism, and the work of French theorist Sylvain Lazarus.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Duncan Stuart: You're well known for your book Mistaken Identity but I understand you’re working on a new problematic regarding emancipatory politics and how to think through it. In regard to this, I wanted to get your thoughts on a certain dynamic we've seen emerge since the protests over the murder of George Floyd, which passed another anniversary mark in May. This dynamic is that in these protests you get millions of participants talking and acting with revolutionary fervor, but afterwards there's a loss of that fervor. Even recently when people speak about these protests they point to changes that, while significant, don't match the scale of the protests. Joe Biden is a better president than Donald Trump, and Derek Chauvin's conviction was a landmark event. Yet if the largest protest movement in this country's history has as its result a more moderate president and a guilty conviction for someone who committed murder on camera, it seems like there is a disconnect between the world-historical dimensions of the protest and its outcomes. What are we to make of this disconnect?
Asad Haider: I think that this disconnect between participation in a movement and the outcome is not just something that's incidental or that appears only in particular cases. This is something that is always there in politics. We have a spontaneous tendency to think of things in terms of outcomes, outcomes that are fulfillments of what we want or expressions of our will. When we think of politics in this way, we’re drifting away from the question of political action itself. To be clear, this doesn’t mean going to an absurd extreme and saying that outcomes don't matter. Obviously it matters immensely whether you achieve some kind of social change, and today it’s necessary to achieve it on scale that goes beyond what most of us imagine. What makes that possible, however, and what causes it, is not necessarily going to correspond to our immediate experiences and perceptions. At the level of experience, some might dismiss street protest as fleeting enthusiasm which advances no practical program, while others will insist that this experience is intrinsically militant and confirms the revolutionary character of the action. I think neither is the case. Neither of these really capture what is happening. What is meaningful about that experience is the extent to which the stasis of everyday life has been interrupted and suddenly there is a situation in which it is possible to do something else, to do something that wasn't possible before; it’s possible to go out on the street at midnight and join a group of people who are suddenly and collectively refusing to obey the police. Most of the time that's not possible, and the fact that sometimes it becomes possible is a significant thing to know about the world. But this is only the beginning of a process which can’t be understood in terms of a final cause.
DS: This notion of the possible and possibility seems to be laden with contingency, in so far as it’s related to this disconnect between politics and outcome. If this is true, don't we need to reconsider what failure means? I'm reminded here of Perry Anderson's famous remark in Considerations on Western Marxism that the history of Western Marxism is a history of failure.
AH: Yes. However, I would resist the position of world judgment, of making a judgment of history. It may be the hard-won position of Perry Anderson to make a judgment of all of history, but it isn’t my aim. If we’re talking about the very delimited question of the history of Marxism in the 20th century—especially if we look at the period Anderson is talking about—I think there is also a profound kind of success that has to be understood.
DS: Can you say more about what you take this success to be? Right now, things seem pretty grim as we face down growing inequality and environmental catastrophe. It does not appear to be the case that we are living in world where Marxism or even Democratic Socialism has succeeded.
AH: I would say it did fail, but it failed a little later; it failed after it had succeeded. We can frame this progression from success to failure as the crisis of Marxism. Of course, the crisis of Marxism has been declared since the beginning of the 20th century—Karl Korsch declares it early on. But it’s really in the late 70s, I think, that we witness a crisis of Marxism, with the trajectory of the national liberation struggles, the situation of communist parties in Western Europe, the end of cultural revolution in China, and so on.
DS: Can you tell us more about the crisis of Marxism and its significance?
AH: Let me specify that I’m talking about Marxism not simply as a doctrine or mode of analysis, but also as a material force. Marxism emerges as human societies are being completely reshaped and restructured by capitalism. Of course, we have a long history of class societies and a long history of domination, but the historical point of Marxism’s emergence is that domination takes the very specific form of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism is a concentrated and persistent form of domination. Marxism emerged as a way of understanding it, to be sure, but also fundamentally as a political statement about the possibility and necessity of overturning it. It was a thesis of possibility and a political prescription of the movements that were emerging within and against capitalism. In this way we could say that it was historically “active,” and after arising in the 19th century it becomes, in the 20th century, a universal referent for emancipatory politics. At a certain point this ceases to be the case.
Some people take positions that already in, say, 1928, Marxism had failed—like they killed off your favorite character early in the season and now you don't want to watch the show anymore. I don't think we can look at it that way. The crisis is best understood as the point at which Marxism ceases to be this universal referent, because the state socialist societies are continuing to degenerate and are heading towards collapse, the national liberation struggles are disintegrating into destructive internecine conflicts, and reactionary identitarian ideologies are displacing the idea of universal emancipation. And it’s precisely because Marxism bridges between knowledge and active material force that this represents a profound crisis: why is it that this theory which was supposed to explain the course of history and operate as a force of human emancipation did not function in either way. Now that is a real crisis.
But this crisis is only because Marxism had first succeeded. What do I mean by the success of Marxism? I mean, first of all, the fact that you had a series of major communist revolutions that went on for the majority of the 20th century. These are, on their own terms, successes. Once again, while outcomes matter, they are not the sole and ultimate criteria of judgment. The fact these revolutions even happened to begin with is an enormous success, and despite the fact that they did not manage to build societies in which domination and exploitation were overcome, they nevertheless established for a large part of the 20th century that capitalism could not be taken for granted as the natural and universal system of human society. The idea that “there is no alternative” was simply not true.
So really the core of Marxism’s success is the very fact that it was the active material force I’ve described. Western Marxism is supposed to have been isolated in universities, but if we take a global perspective, it’s clear that Marxism was the universal referent of 20th century revolution, not only for the workers’ movements of the advanced capitalist world but also of the worldwide struggles against imperialism.
DS: It seems like success and failure are then not measured by permanence. Something successful can fade away, but this does not make it a failure. It seems you adhere to such an idea. In one of your essays from March 2021, "Emancipation and Exhaustion," you wrote: "politics, by which I mean specifically emancipatory politics, is an exceptional phenomenon. It does not happen with frequency. Just as it has to appear, it also fades away.” This notion of fading away does not correspond to most people's notion of politics. Is it not the case that there are big wins that come through the hard work of grassroots organizing? Isn’t there something counterintuitive, or even self-defeating, in the way you’re conceiving of success and failure?
AH: Let's situate ourselves first. I emphasized the success of Marxism in the 20th century because thinking solely in terms of failure replaces knowledge with judgment: we judge the entire process according to the final outcome, without understanding that these outcomes have many different causes, and they may not be best explained by whatever it is that we find objectionable about the process. If we were to look at the great revolutions, and many instances of political action throughout human history, and understood them solely in terms of the failure, we would not understand what they invented and what aspects of these inventions remain valid.
By recognizing the validity of these political inventions, we can generate meaningful knowledge about the failures. This is just as necessary, because we’re all familiar with the many forms of denial common among leftists, which amount to different ways of refusing to confront the fact that the revolutionary sequences came to an end. Those who are unwilling to acknowledge this ending will simply try to repeat the precise practices and procedures of the past, rather than repeating the creative invention that constitutes emancipatory politics. For all the fixation on repeating the past, it’s actually a refusal to learn from the past. So, we have to strike a very complicated balance. We can’t simply dismiss the practices of the past because they ultimately ended in failure, but we also can’t simply ignore their real limits.
DS: In your mind what is the relationship between theoretical work and political action?
AH: Lenin sums it up well in the postscript to The State and Revolution. He's been working on this research on the state and in the postscript he says he couldn't finish because he was “interrupted” by events, which of course is nothing less than the October Revolution. It’s a good thing, he says, to have such interruptions. But this isn’t just an incidental aside, it’s actually the character of Marxism as a theory: it must be interrupted. Marxism is rather more complicated than other theories. First of all, this is because Marxism tries to give a materialist and historical account of ideas, and the relationship between social being and consciousness. Yet it is itself a set of ideas, so at the same time as it’s constructing a materialist conception of knowledge, it’s also located within the field it’s setting out to explain. Already this is rather complicated. But what complicates matters much further is that not only does it have to explain its own position within the social structure and how that social structure will change historically, but it also aims to actually alter this historical course. That is a rather greater challenge than formulating norms or utopias. So actually what certain Marxists might interpret as threats to the coherence of the theory—the interruption or the crisis—really constitute its specificity and significance. If these things didn't happen it would be a theory or ideology like any other. The interruption is always there, by the way, throughout Marx's work, as Lenin points out through State and Revolution. Something different happens and he goes back to the drawing board.
DS: Marxism is situated but also trying to alter the situation. Yet it is a doctrine, it is not nebulous or without principles. What, in your opinion, are the principles that ground Marxism? What form does Marxism take?
AH: You mean, let’s say, what is the "thisness" of Marxism? First of all, we would have to say there is something called emancipatory politics which is not just Marxism. If you don't have that you can't understand how there can be struggles against domination that are not part of the space and time of capitalism. For some time Marx and Engels tried to present a general theory of history. They saw, in a matter consistent with many previous thinkers, history as a development of freedom, an overcoming of servitude. Later, Marx came to delimit what a theory can do, and rather than talking about an entire theory of history he made claims that were specific to the capitalist mode of production, in a specific historical period, and would go on to say in his commentaries on Russia that his analysis could not be taken to indicate a general and necessary future course. Once you have delimited the scope of the theory in this way—you’re talking about the specificity of capitalism, of a historical moment—then you can't just talk about the overcoming of servitude as the general tendency of human history. You have to see it as something which appears, to repurpose Lenin’s formulation, as an interruption of history, and this can be observed in different singular instances. That means that Marxism itself is one of those instances, an instance of emancipatory politics.
This is why we have to draw lines of demarcation within Marxist theory that separate its emancipatory political prescriptions, specific to the capitalist situation, from the doctrine of historical necessity. And let’s note that the doctrine of historical necessity poses many problems for contemporary “democratic socialists,” because the guarantee of historical necessity in the “immortal science” of dialectical materialism, which is the knowledge of the party that is implemented by the state, has lost its appeal. Of course, there are good reasons for that, and there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with the words “democratic socialism”—in fact, you might say that true democracy is itself an interruption of the institutional order of oligarchy. But if democratic socialism is situated within the laws of historical necessity, there must be some conception of progress, and normative standards which would confirm that progress is taking place. For that you need liberalism, I’m afraid. But liberalism isn’t an emancipatory politics.
Certain Marxists might want to say they're superior to liberal political theory because they have a “materialist” conception of history, which apparently gives them some kind of better grasp of the way human societies operate than liberals, who perhaps are “idealists.” And yet when you ask them why this matters they just go to liberal political theory anyway: they'll say that there are these norms or aspects of human nature which guarantee, to put it provocatively, that socialism is the “end of history.” There’s no intrinsic reason that an explanation of history as proceeding towards a goal should be considered emancipatory purely on the basis of its explanatory power. So this isn’t sufficient to specify Marxism. First you have to specify emancipatory politics, and then why it took the form of Marxism in the situation that it did.
Emancipatory politics, in my view, begins with a decision. Not some kind of decision about who your friends and enemies are, but a decision about people’s capacity. Are people equal, and are people capable of governing themselves? These are not questions subject to proof. But once we’ve made a decision about emancipatory politics, we have to see that as antagonism in the whole history of political thought. Marx was not the first to say that everyone should rule; he was a careful student of the history of politics, and even if he came more and more to restrict his scientific analysis to the specificity of the capitalist mode of production, he understood that the question of emancipation appears across time and across worlds. If you can't take that position, if you’re unwilling to make a decision on emancipation and instead resort to the laws of historical necessity and their liberal supplement, then you've ended up far away from Marx himself, no matter how fervently you might claim to be a Marxist.
DS: The French theorist Sylvain Lazarus has recently captured your interest. You have even begun to adopt his terminology in your recent work. What is it you find compelling about Lazarus and how did you encounter his work?
AH: This is an example of the contingent encounter. The background here is crucial. Around the time I first came across Lazarus I was engaged in two threads of research. The first was the category of “class composition” that came from Italian workerism, as you can see in the classic years of Viewpoint Magazine. The second was the question of “race and class” which, for better or worse, drew far more attention and resulted in Mistaken Identity.
Class composition was important to the Viewpoint collective, first of all, because we formed during the Occupy Movement. The Occupy Movement put the slogan “we are the 99%,” into the public consciousness. Despite the vagueness of this slogan, it unmistakably pointed to class in a way that seemed extremely new in my lifetime. When I had participated in political activism in earlier years, the content of the activity never really seemed to be about class struggle—even though the ideas I discovered through my involvement in the anti-war movement consistently emphasized the centrality of capitalism in the imperialism we were protesting.
During Occupy, it appeared to become possible to talk about capitalism. “99%,” however, is not a concept of class; it’s a statistic. Even statistically, I assure you that 99% of people were not camped in front of City Hall or on Wall Street. In fact, it was mostly a very specific set of social types: people who had gone to college, had a lot of debt, and were working three minimum-wage jobs, or didn't have a job at all. This isn’t a reason to dismiss the movement; students and intellectuals have been involved in popular revolutions for centuries. But why didn’t a movement against economic inequality extend to the broader populations of the exploited and dispossessed? Class composition seemed a promising way to think about this, to think conceptually about the complexity of this moment, as opposed to an empiricist understanding which says that the working class is just a static object that can be abstractly defined. Class composition starts not with sociological definition, but with inquiry into specific labor-processes, specific levels of development of capitalist production, that compose distinct and determinate forms of the working class. But it is also an inquiry into the political forms of organization which transform the technical organization, which transform the economic existence of the working class, their political activity. This is a conception of class as something that changes historically and is politically contested. It’s a way of trying to understand how it happens that class as a productive force becomes a political agent. Or, to put it a little differently, this was the absent question of class composition.
Then, on the other side I made a decision, which I look back upon with ambivalence, to put the words “race and class” in the subtitle of the first edition of Mistaken Identity. As I recount in the book, I was politicized by learning about the movements against racism in the United States, as well as the global anti-imperialist movements, and this study convinced me that class struggle was intrinsic to this whole range of struggles. It was a political axiom. Yet so much of the contemporary discourse around race seemed not only to neglect class struggle but even present it as a fundamentally white or European notion. My goal in Mistaken Identity was to defend this political axiom, and I supported it with some historical commentary on the “composition” of class and race in American history, but this was quite specific to that particular case rather than a general theory of the relationship between race and class. But a massive proportion of commentators asked, “Where’s the explanation? What is the relationship between race and class?” These questions just wouldn’t go away. So I had to stop and think, why were they asking me that, what did they think I was going to say? Finally I realized that, first of all, the motivation for this question is also political, it’s not for the sake of greater knowledge about social relations. Second, I was never seeking to provide such an explanation and am in fact methodologically opposed to that register of theorizing. And it was really in the arguments over my book that I realized that was not what I had set out to do. The reason people wanted such an explanation was that even if it seemed to be a question of pure social analysis—to understand the relationship between social relations we call “race" and “class"—it’s actually a demand for a guarantee for independently formulated political positions, which will be retroactively justified by the explanation of these social phenomena.
DS: So the background is the fact class is not as clear-cut a concept as we might think, and also a realization that for some, a political position should be justified sociologically. How does Lazarus enter the picture here?
AH: The defining issue of Viewpoint was issue three, on Workers’ Inquiry, and while researching it I came across an article by Lazarus called "Workers’ Anthropology and Factory Inquiry.” But it was really outside the theoretical problematic we were working with, and with so much research and translation to do in Italian I didn’t get around to reading it. But four years later I finally read the Lazarus article, the day before I published one of the few follow-up articles I’ve written responding to debates about my book. Usually I had been accused of being some kind of crude Marxist, or simply some kind of self-hating person of color, who thought class is the only thing that matters. It wasn’t really possible to respond to these accusations since they immediately devolved into quasi-religious ad hominem denunciations. But this particular article was a response to a unique and unexpected accusation, which was that I had failed to understand the centrality of class!
Given that I had been preoccupied for the better part of the preceding decade with figuring out how to produce an adequate theory of class, this was surprising, but perhaps also a kind of generative challenge that pushed me to investigate other ways of thinking about class. So I read this Lazarus article and it was, you know, very unexpected. I was very surprised to encounter an argument which was so unfamiliar and yet addressed what we might call the common “epistemological obstacle” of both of these debates: the assumption that social analysis would determine and guarantee a correct political practice. But actually, this is a justificatory assumption, because even when people say, “we've figured out what’s happening in social relations and now we'll have the correct politics,” what they’re actually doing is starting with a political line they already assume is correct, and then developing a social analysis that justifies their already determined position. What I encountered in Lazarus was a theory which completely severed the link. It was not a matter of generating a more complex and sophisticated social analysis, or a more dynamic and historicized account of the relation between the social structure and political practice. Here I encountered the proposition that politics is not an expression of social categories—including class. And yet it was not remotely a shift towards liberalism or pluralism. In fact, this article was still an inquiry about factory workers and something that could be categorized as class struggle, and yet said the category of class is not actually sufficient for us to understand what workers think and the political prescriptions they make. That was provocative, even disturbing. But at times we have a morbid urge to immerse ourselves in the things that disturb us. So I read Lazarus’s book, Anthropology of the Name, and his other articles to understand this severing of the social from politics, which also led me to a rereading of Alain Badiou, whose work now seemed to me to address entirely different problems from the ones that were most prominent when he initially emerged on the American scene.
Now this argument doesn’t mean there's no relationship between politics and sociohistorical conditions, because there must be one. Actually determining this relationship is much more difficult than many assume; the problem tends to be resolved in advance with the doctrine of historical necessity and its normative supplement. Formulating an adequate account of this relationship is an urgent task for theoretical work. But my emphasis, as a position on the theoretical battlefield, is that politics must be independently formulated and asserted, and that this must even be done prior to social analysis. But this doesn’t mean simply assuming and then justifying the main tenets of progressive and activist etiquette, but the far more difficult task of formulating a conception of emancipatory politics in terms of itself.
This framework actually allowed me to better understand the role that class played in Mistaken Identity. Class, in fact, consistent with its presentation in Marxism, was an index of the politics of universal emancipation. Marxism as an instance of the politics of universal emancipation was articulated in terms of class. We can say that class was a category of universal emancipation for the situation within Marxism emerged as an active material force, but it is not the general foundation of emancipatory politics, because—I will say this “under erasure”—emancipation is its own foundation.
DS: In Lazarus there's a lot of talk about thought, interiority, this phrase “people think.” To be crass these seem to be idealist terms. This seems very far from what many would take to be the core tenets of Marxism. The idea of praxis and materiality seem central not just to a commonsense view of Marxism, but also to several Marxist scholars’ understanding of it.
AH: Materialism is extremely ambiguous, and often raises more problems than it solves. Lenin said, “intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid materialism.” What is materialism? Let’s try to determine explicitly what’s at stake here, because after all, who thinks that there isn't a material world? I am told there are such people. But in fact much of our contemporary common sense assumes that technology is the driver of human progress, that the functioning of our minds is determined by the health of our physical bodies, that our thoughts are determined by chemicals that bounce around in our brains. Materialism is really a question about the relationship between thought and being, or thought and matter, so it is actually a question about the nature of knowledge. This makes it very difficult, because it seems materialism must simultaneously say that matter has primacy over thought, but also that everything is matter. If we’re to say that materialism is a claim about the primacy of matter—that matter is primary over thought—that means these are separate things, matter and thought, and despite the claim that matter is primary, there’s something that isn’t matter, and insofar as we’re thinking about matter, it’s rather difficult to avoid ending up in the position that there is something that transcends matter, no matter how much we try to devalue it. If on the other hand you just say everything is matter, it’s now become difficult to explain how this actually constitutes a meaningful position, since there is no such thing as a non-material idea which could be explained by material causes—it’s already in itself material to begin with. Now idealism is an impossible position, and materialism has undermined its own importance.
There is a false certainty in the answer that tries to give more substantial content to materialism by claiming that it relates social phenomena to economic causes. In fact, this is almost a non-sequitur, because the question was about matter, and what makes “economic” relations “material”? This simply presumes what it’s supposed to explain. In fact, the separate sphere of the economic is relatively new in human history. This is a basic problem established at the very beginning of Marx's thinking: what precedes the separation of state and civil society, of the economic and political? If in feudalism what we would now call civil society is directly political, then how can we use the categories of the economic to explain the emergence of the economic itself? This is an anachronistic and teleological explanation. This difficulty seems to be pushed aside in The German Ideology and the Poverty of Philosophy, which say that there's an underlying continuity of economic causes throughout history centered on the development of the productive forces, though for a more concise account you might consult Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Of course, Marx repeats this framework with admirable clarity in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in which he alludes to another text which he left in the drawer, the 1857 Introduction. It is an attempt, as suggestive as it is inconclusive, to return to the question of the historical status of categories: how can we, in the study of different periods of history with totally different social relations, use a single category to explain them, when we have defined the category according to the specificity of the historical period we are studying? Strangely, you might say that this is a problem reformulated by Michel Foucault a century later in The Order of Things. Marx’s most obvious example is labor: how can we apply the category of labor to societies in which different kinds of human activity can't really be equated and assimilated into a single category, because—as Marx will point out in an early footnote of Capital by invoking Aristotle—they have entirely different ends? That's a very difficult problem, but after this extremely sophisticated attempt at precisely formulating the question, he suppresses it, and says in the Preface two years later that it would be "confusing to anticipate results which still have to be substantiated.”
That's really a basic problem of the discourse on method. Can you start with a discourse on method when the method actually is the operation of rational thought? We have to be grateful for Marx’s attempt at providing one, but even in the 1857 Introduction he clearly points to the difficulty: the method is the appropriation of the concrete by thought, and he will go as far as to say it is the formulation of the concrete in thought. Materialism isn’t a matter of tractors and blast furnaces. Materialism is a matter of concepts.
DS: It seems to me that Lazarus has an axiomatic approach. At the heart of his theory is that people think and that politics and social relations do not have an obvious relationship—to say the least—politics, as you said earlier, comes first. This approach seems far away from this idea of Marxism as situated in the changing situation. At the same time, such an approach seem crucial for thinking through the crisis of Marxism and the issue of class composition.
AH: There is a tension here but also a continuity, because these novel points about Marxism arise from Althusser's arguments—who himself, after all, presented an extremely important argument about the crisis of Marxism. Any serious study of the intellectual and political history confirms that the theoretical advances made by Lazarus and Badiou were only made possible by Althusser's intervention; they are inconceivable without it. This should not be controversial, since after a brief period of exaggerated Maoist denunciation we have an abundance of explicit and theoretically rich affirmations of this line of influence—for example in the 1991 conference on Althusser organized by Lazarus (Badiou’s speech is collected in his Pocket Pantheon). It is simply impossible to understand how Lazarus and Badiou develop the problems of Marxist theory and communist politics without studying Althusser—and in doing so you have to “eat your vegetables” and read and understand the foundational 1965 works, For Marx and Reading Capital, before allowing yourself to indulge in the flashy texts on interpellation and aleatory materialism.
And yet like the many great thinkers formed by Althusser’s intervention, including for example Étienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière, not to mention commentators like Stuart Hall and Judith Butler who were not directly connected, they went in directions which went far beyond the scope of his work. The major question is that of the political subject, but it is also, in the case of Lazarus and Badiou, the severing of social analysis and politics.
Now, it seems preposterous to me to measure the work of any particular thinker according to whether they have resolved every possible theoretical question. If we stand on the shoulders of giants, it is in the sense not only that our own thought draws on their theoretical inventions, but also that the gaps in their thoughts allow us to engage in our own inventions. Althusser opened the way to a theory of the political subject which did not absorb it into the subject of experience and the subject of history. But he did not follow through on formulating that theory. On the other hand, while Lazarus and Badiou, and we could add here also Rancière, have made indispensable contributions to formulating this theory, they have not provided satisfactory accounts of two questions that were Althusser’s major contributions, though such work has indeed been done by Balibar, Macherey, Hall, and Butler.
The first is that with the theory of ideology (and I mean dating back to the version laid out in 1963-4 in “Marxism and Humanism”), Althusser posed the question of why it is so often the case that people do not think, why most of the time we are not subjects who have fidelity to the event. The second is that Althusser presented a distinct method and practice of social analysis, and a distinct concept of history, represented by terms like overdetermination, conjuncture, structural causality, and the encounter.
These insights remain very important to me, including in the discussions of race and class. Regarding race itself, I have argued for a theory of “racial ideology,” and with unapologetic and undisguised plagiarism I have defined “identity” as a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. Racial ideology takes it as “obvious” that there are groups of human beings determined by characteristics that are fundamental to their “selves.” This ideology, the assumption that race is an “identity,” prevents us from actually producing knowledge of the real causes of "race”: the socially and historically specific processes that classify people according to arbitrarily chosen aspects of human variation.
Regarding the relation between “race and class,” I have insisted on a method of social analysis that corresponds to materialism as the movement from the abstract to the concrete, the grasping of the real through the production of concepts, and the analysis of conjunctures against prevailing conceptions of expressive totality and historical continuity. That is, I go as far as to argue that there is no such thing as a “relation between race and class,” because we cannot determine a general relationship between two abstractions. These abstractions have no discrete and self-contained existence out there in reality—as if we could, say, draw up a schedule of a migrant worker’s day and say that what happened from 9am-11am was primarily caused by racism, while the rest of the day consisted of economic exploitation. I am being deliberately absurd because this method of proceeding is indeed this absurd. Rather than brushing away the complexity of concrete phenomena and distilling their essence from their contingent circumstances of existence, we want to take these abstractions and add back the multiplicity of determinations, to understand how contingency “becomes necessary” in an uneven historical process, how different temporalities are intertwined. The general theory of race, even if it rejects crude biological racism, still leads inexorably back to racial ideology, by taking “race” to be an “obvious” category. These abstractions aren’t simply objects contained within reality, but starting points for theoretical work that uses them to produce concepts that can grasp aspects of the complex social whole—the uneven processes by which specific racial classifications are constituted.
So while I’m not concerned about fitting into some kind of Procrustean “Marxist” doctrine constructed by self-proclaimed experts in socialism, I’m also not prepared to leave behind these aspects of “materialist” analysis that Althusser derived from a rigorous reading of Marxist thought. What remains to be done is to reformulate these insights after the more recent breakthroughs in thinking the political subject and emancipatory politics.
DS: As we complicate these questions it seems we are also getting away from economic—and in the simplest sense, “material”—concerns. Right at the start of Mistaken Identity you talk about the transformative effect seeing poverty in Pakistan had on how you think about politics. The appeal of Marxism, of this crude notion of materialism, seems to be related in how it lets us understand class and how it might be possible to overcome the suffering associated with poverty and capitalism more generally. It tells us a clear story about why there is poverty when there doesn't have to be. The concern is that we are losing a clear picture of justice and the alleviation of unnecessary suffering. Given all you said what's to become of such questions?
AH: It’s not true, though, that a concern for poverty, generally speaking, has any intrinsic relation to an “orthodox" Marxist position on the primacy of the economic. Mother Teresa cares about the poor, Gandhi cares about the poor, because of a humanitarian sentiment that leads to a practice of charity. Marx rigorously distinguishes himself from humanitarian sentiment and charity in two ways. First, this poverty is generated by the character of the capitalist mode of production, it's not just part of the natural order. The humanitarian ideology glorifies the poor and sees virtue in suffering. Marx’s argument is not that we should treat the poor with dignity, but that nobody should be poor. We have to transform the underlying structure that engenders poverty and we have to eliminate it. But in order to do that you have to engage in political practice, which may not appear to be directly related to things like poverty. You might have to—in fact, Marx thought you definitely had to and I haven’t seen any convincing argument to the contrary—seize state power and smash the capitalist state. That’s not the same as feeding the poor, even though feeding poor is an entirely laudable thing to do, if it is done in a way that recognizes that the poor are people who think, rather than transfiguring their sublime suffering. Being aware of poverty, having empathy for those who are suffering, doesn’t automatically lead to the knowledge that this shameful reality, the daily disgrace we tolerate of children dying of starvation in a world of technological capacity unimaginable only decades ago, is a structural feature of global capitalism. In turn, that knowledge doesn’t lead to a knowledge of how this economic reality is perpetuated by political forms which are not simply direct expressions of the economic, but involve particular ruling-class strategies and forms of hegemony that require oppositional strategies in response.
But there’s another step here, a fundamentally important step, which is what happens when you seize political power and smash the capitalist state? Obviously, you want to redirect the wealth of society towards satisfying human needs. We have not yet succeeded in achieving this, but at the purely practical level, it certainly cannot be more complicated than Elon Musk taking a vacation in outer space. And the question of meeting human needs, of whether we have a society which is actually directed towards meeting the basic needs of everyone, takes us back to the basic axiomatic decisions of politics, the questions of equality and self-governance. "For the rulers of society, for those who don’t believe that people are equal and should control their own lives, poverty is nothing more than a problem of social control. The conviction that we should eliminate poverty, rather than manage it with forms of discipline and spirituality, still flows from the decision on emancipation, and it means we have to invent new forms of self-governance." This is what Marx sees in the Paris Commune and what Lenin sees in the soviets. It is an entirely straightforward consequence of Marx and Lenin’s analysis. The state is an aspect of class society, and when you have gone through the process of abolishing classes you put the state, as Engels wrote in an incomparably beautiful passage, in the museum of antiquities where it belongs, alongside the bronze axe and the spinning wheel. What come after that is some different way of organizing human life, and we don’t know what that looks like or how to get there. In this sense the statement “people think” is not only an axiomatic decision, but a wager on the capacity of people to imagine and build communist forms of life.
DS: Can you say more on how does this idea of “people think” fits into this question of getting around the state?
AH: Let me get at this through a bit of a detour. Some Marxists have this idea that since Marx presented a brilliant and elaborate analysis of, let’s say, the value-form, this is all we need to understand communism. It’s about overcoming the value-form, and that’s utterly incommensurable with all the primitive political positions that may have come before. I think Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production is indispensable, and there’s a considerable importance to all the categories he elaborated to understand it—though I would emphasize that they’re not all contained in the first chapter of Volume 1. However, I think we have to be very careful to avoid leaping from there to the position that by passing through capitalism it becomes possible to overcome human servitude. That is teleological statement that must be questioned on its own terms. Certainly, it’s true that the development of the productive forces makes it possible to overcome a long history of suffering. But the fact that this is possible in no way implies that it will actually happen, and in fact the development of the productive forces might result in us being boiled alive before we even get a chance to figure out how to compel philosophers and literary critics to play a productive role in socialist society.
There's also something that's very false about making that statement, because of the simple fact that people actually have resisted servitude as long as it has existed. We’re almost better off with a kind of idealist claim that there's continuity in history proceeding towards freedom, because even if it doesn’t fully take hold very often, there has always been resistance. And those who rule unequal societies have always been very conscious of this.
As I’ve already emphasized, as long as people have talked about the nature of political life, they’ve posed a fundamental question about who governs, and Marx was not afraid to confront this question and reverse the verdict of history, the continuous claim at the core of political thought that only the few are fit to govern. In no sense does the novelty of Marx’s analysis of value and commodity exchange entail leaving this question behind. Capitalist societies, I repeat, are a particular form of class rule, a particular system of domination and exploitation, which in themselves are nothing new. So even when they take this highly unusual capitalist form, the persistence of domination and inequality mean we still face the decision: do we believe that people are equal, that they think, that they should govern themselves—or not? That's yes or no. You can talk all you want about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, but when it comes down to it, you're going to have to tell us what you think about that. That's politics, that's the political question. Marx was not afraid to make a radical decision for emancipation, and never betrayed it.
DS: As I think through these questions about politics I think about the looming political problem for my generation, and indeed yours, Asad, is the problem of environmental catastrophe and climate change. In this framework of “people think,” the anti-statist legacy of Marxism, and its experimental nature, can we fashion a politics that could face up to such a challenge?
AH: When we look at this condition of climate emergency, or the pandemic, we probably have to start by acknowledging how little we know about what actually can be done. Maybe it’s better than we think, maybe it’s worse. I do think we should consider possibilities that might not be convenient for our political rhetoric. Sometimes it seems for socialists that it’s really an article of faith that we have to overthrow capitalism to address climate change. The “death agony” of capitalism has been proclaimed before, but capitalism showed itself to be rather extraordinary in its adaptability, and what we saw instead was its unprecedented flourishing. It may be rhetorically persuasive to present a political program in an apocalyptic tone: if you don’t become socialists, the end is near. If that kind of rhetoric is effective, perhaps it’s an acceptable tool. But this is really a question for poets, preachers, and public relations departments.
What I am certain of is that we have an irrational society which is not well equipped to deal with problems that require subordinating the profit motive to anything, even the existence of the planet. Getting rid of capitalism and constructing a rational society will surely improve our chances, and emancipatory politics is inextricably linked with the proposition that people have the capacity for a rational organization of human life. Those who deny the possibility of emancipatory politics and divert us from these aims, who cynically use the language of social justice to insist that there is no alternative to capitalism, that it’s impossible to change the world, will bear some responsibility for the disasters that may lie ahead.
But I think we can conceive of many dystopian solutions to climate change, some of which may preserve the worst aspects of capitalist society. Perhaps markets will be brought under greater regulation and control, but science-fiction style social stratification will maintain extreme levels of inequality, which allow Elon Musk to sit in his starship while the constant threat of drowning and heat stroke compel the majority of the world’s population to accept various forms of forced labor, surveillance, and the commodification of their minds and bodies.
So whatever lies ahead, we still need the emancipatory prescription. The need for that will not have been obviated. I maintain that politics itself remains an entirely independent question, one which we have to conceive “in interiority.” Politics still stands on its own; there are still decisions to make.
Asad Haider is a founding Editor of Viewpoint Magazine, an investigative journal of contemporary politics. He is the author of Mistaken Identity and a co-editor for The Black Radical Tradition (forthcoming). His writing can be found in The Baffler, n+1, The Point, Salon, and elsewhere.