I’ve been reflecting of late on what it feels like to mature as a Marxist. I think I can finally say that I am maturing. Not because I get everything right, far from it, but because I’m more aware than ever of how little I know.
That uncertainty now sits alongside a confidence I didn’t have before: a measured confidence in Marxism as a method and praxis, hard won over years.
I first encountered Marxism for myself in a rogue reading group when I was a teenager in high school. Later, I found it fed to me through academic studies. Back then I thought that making it as a working-class kid in a rarefied environment meant that I knew the most of anyone about Marx.
I had read all the literature surrounding him and mused over New Left Review in my spare time. I had Hegel munched up, Kant spat out, Nietzsche on my right hand, and had amired one too many pat Foucauldian reconstructions of historical Kantianism aimed at Marx. As a literature student I felt I had become so intimate with him and that I could reconstruct all his author moves. I knew what Marx was doing, where Marx went wrong, and which later thinkers had done Marx better.
Or so I believed.
I had so much energy for this that I went around accusing my enemies, those Department Hobbit philosophers and their mentors, of idealism and covert bourgeois sympathies. I read Capital Volume I cover to cover, covering its margins in fineliner: commodity fetishism, dancing tables, vampires, dead labour, primitive accumulation.
Then I opened Volume II.
Page after page of tables, schemas and repetition. A bore and a chore. It defeated me. It all looked like dead forms. So I went back to Hegel and Bataille, whose Accursed Share had potlatch and orgies. Here was the Henry Milleresque state of rapture I craved, to such an excess that I remember literally vomiting while smoking a cigar and reading Bataille alone in a public park. Nausea was my thing, not Sartre’s. And when Socialist Alternative tried to hand me flyers with “Have you read Marx?” in big letters, I ignored them because, had I ever.
But I digress.
Eventually I stopped reading Marx altogether. Unionism absorbed my time. I drifted through social democracy and, worse, a liberalism that unhappily struck me, only to teach me how little it deserved my attention.
The odd thing is that, suddenly, after trying to be a socialist for so many years I found I could not stop being one. It emerged up inside me due to a deep change in how I experienced my social relations, and following the recent pandemic, reflecting on my experiences and the historical moment, I entered my forties more committed to communism than at any earlier point in my life.
There is that cliched old saying that if you aren’t a communist at twenty you have no heart, and if you aren’t a capitalist at forty you have no brain. It has been falsely attributed to Winston Churchill, and I’ve even seen it besmirching George Bernard Shaw’s good name. A bad idea seeks to gain authority by being attached to dead famous white men. And like all effective propaganda, it’s bad, false, and dangerous to know.
Because the reality is so different. There are so many wise elders of Marxism who have drawn on experience to discipline and deepen their thinking, and I am grateful for all of them, for their generosity, and sometimes even their crotchetiness. But if I’m ever going to be absorbed by a parallel phrase with heads and hearts, then I prefer the young Marx from his introduction to A Critique to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844): “criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion.”1
Perhaps that helps express what I mean by maturing as a Marxist: developing a head of passion. I’ve now become less interested in discovering the correct Marxism and more fascinated by the different things Marxism allows us to see—and they are many. Having absorbed Marxism across so many forums, in books, unions, organisations, conferences, arguments and different political systems, I now know that Marxism is not a doctrine: it is an open discipline of thought and practice.
Disciplines contain unresolved problems. Marxism gives us extraordinary ways of understanding the world, but it has so many problems left to solve. Some of its disagreements seem to exist because Marxism holds together things that are in tension.
Now that I am passionately reading and researching Marx and Marxism again, I am beginning to see those tensions that I previously missed. The younger me thought Marx had abandoned living relationships, and had expressed himself in the dead categories of old theoretical volumes. The older me has begun to understand Marx as increasingly circling a dialectical problem that never left him as he sought to understand the greatest Marxist challenge of all: how to at once diagnose and overthrow Capitalism, while developing the practices to create Communism in its place.
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There is a question that has been circulating in my thinking for most of this year: How do our living relationships gain forms that come to rule over how we relate to each other?
I believe that Marxism is designed to explore all the complexities of this question. Marxism seems to experience two tendencies that warrant exploration. These tendencies are like constellations for our dialectics. For want of better names, I’ll call them Form Marxism and Relational Marxism. They aren’t schools; instead they describe an arrangement you could pick out in the horizon of Marxism: Where do you start looking?
Form Marxism begins with money, property, commodities, corporations, markets and the state—among other things. It asks critical questions about how these forms organise our lives, and it also asks us to consider what forms we need to change, and which ones we would need to build, for capitalism to end.
Relational Marxism begins with people in the total socal relation of capital: these are people who are working, cooperating, caring, ruling, resisting and organising together. It asks us to understand critically and even structurally what people are doing together, what they are becoming capable of doing, and what powers their relationships can create or that can be exploited.
The younger me could see both of these Marxisms in some shape or other, but what I couldn’t see was why Marx kept moving between them. Relations were alive to me, while forms seemed like deadends I could put away on the shelf. I hadn’t yet understood why Marx was making these movements from one to the other, so reading Capital left me with an analytical quagmire that slowed me down and made me think, but I was still not able to understand the way Marx was analysing the social totality of life under Capitalism.
The missing concept for me was social power.
Marx never settled social power as a key term in his vocabulary within a single, consolidated theory. But across his work he writes of powers, forces, capacities and productive powers, which are, in German, Macht, Kraft, Vermögen, Produktivkraft.2 The peculiar dynamic and dialectic of social power persists in Marx’s writing for nearly forty years, which is as long as it took me in my life to fully spot it. For this time, Marx kept returning to the problem of how human capacities become social powers and how those powers take on objective forms. The most curious thing that Marx analyses is how our relations under capitalism can confront producers with their own powers that reappear in the form of the powers of capital.
Marx appears to have first found this problem in the German philosopher and anthropologist Feuerbach, whose critique of religion appeared to first attract Marx to writing criticism. For Feuerbach, human beings take their own powers, project them into God, and then bow before their creation as a kind of alienated form, or as a fetish. This image of fetishism from the pages of anthropology seemed to haunt Marx, but the more he explored it, he saw the limits of holding onto an abstract human being as an original source of creative power. By 1845, in his famous Theses on Feuerbach, he argued that the human essence was not an abstraction contained in each individual but instead the individual was “the ensemble of the social relations.”3
So if our powers are not capacities that are inalienable in an eternal human essence, what powers do we generate in our relations with one another?4
Marx spent decades assembling his answer. He began to understand that no individual builds a railway. An individual never runs a hospital. They do not accumulate generations of scientific knowledge. Any individual innovation springs out of social powers. When workers cooperate, they become capable of doing things they otherwise could not do independently, and Marx became familiar with this in his studies of the productive forces of labourers under Capitalism. He called it the “social productive power of labour.”5
The power of indviduals in a productive process is a relational one, because it would not exist if it was completely independant. The inversion that Marx took from Feuerbach, moving from heaven to earth and deeper, emerged when the old mole continued to dig into radically material forms. In Capital Volume I, Marx analysed the dialectic of cooperation under capitalism. Because of the way it is organised by capital, Marx says this “social productive power of labour” appears instead as “the productive power of capital.”6
What we create together can confront us as the power of something else.
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The younger me could not see what Marx was trying to say about living social powers. I remember the way I stopped reading Capital volume II, in the mistaken belief that the old grub mole was retreating from life into more and more dead forms I could safely put down.
But I was wrong.
The basic dialectic I am thinking of, the dialectic of Marxism, holds together the different types of Marxism I’ve named: Form Marxism and Relational Marxism. The difficulty of reading the dialectic that Marx uses to move between these types of forms and relations has resulted often in Marxisms that are necessarily incomplete, partial for one critique or the other—and this problem grows the more doctrinal they become.
Marx had his own moves here.
For him, relations produce social powers, and those powers can take on forms that structure our lives. The forms act and live on, shaping our lives and organising the relations that reproduce them.
RELATIONS → SOCIAL POWERS → FORMS
↑ ↓
← ← ← reshape relations ← ← ←
There is, behold, the dialectic.
In the Grundisse, that manuscript of rough drafts, Marx worked out this movement of the dialectic through social powers. As he puts it wonderfully: “The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket.” Money is a thing, but it is as we know a social construct: its power comes from social relations. Elsewhere in the same discussion, the “social connection between persons” becomes “a social relation between things.”7
Even when we carry them in our pockets, our own powers return as powers over us, tying us to roles mediated by things. In Capitalism, what this does to us can have a variety of contradictory and harmful effects.
The social productive forces of our society, for example, ensures that life-saving treatments are available, but an insurer is capable of telling us no, condemning us to poor health or even death. We develop enormous productive capacities as individual workers, but encounter them in corporations compelled to accumulate and lay off anyone who doesn’t use these powers in ways that enrich the stakeholders at exactly the right time. We collectively produce the products and reproduce markets and money, and then organise our lives around what the market demands.
Here Marx’s reading of Feuerbach’s alienated powers is brought back down into the earth of Capitalism.
But, the curious thing is that none of this means that forms are somehow the enemy, that we could smash these forms and somehow an unalienated human would spring forth. This was Marx’s critique of Feuerbach, whose critique of.the fetish seemed to suggest that if humans learned to smash the icons they could learn how to worship their own creative powers.
In fact, Marx distinguished the necessary objectification of social powers from their alienation. Knowledge needs preservation. We also know that railways need building, and cooperation needs organisation. Objective forms don’t create the same subordination as when these accumulated powers confront living people as “alien and dominant” powers.8
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Life needs forms. Organisers and unionists understand this. When workers are gathered together, they talk, grow their trust and learn how to develop a collective power together that they wouldn’t otherwise have without each other. But if they are going to live together as a union that they can leave to the group, they need the form or formal aspect of meetings, minutes, rules, membership, officers, money and so on.
One day soon somebody then says: the union won’t let us do that.
There is the dialectic appearing again, because without forms, our powers can disappear every time everybody goes home. Forms have that eerie tendency of reshaping the relationships that produced them.
The dialectic therefore gives Marxism two problems, problems that cannot be reduced or resolved into one another. If we want to apply our Marxism, we have to transform the forms that we make but that confront us with our own powers. Then we must develop relations and capacities. It is by this process that we can become capable of organising life differently. But there is a tension here, and it is never resolved in Marxism, because it is a living problem.
What this looks like is the movement within Marxism.
Form Marxism without Relational Marxism can often blunt socialism by turning it into an architectural problem: seize power, change ownership, build the institutions. New relations will follow, won’t they? We’ve seen this play out in real time in history.
Relational Marxism without Form Marxism lurches into the opposite: develop cooperation, autonomy, collective capacity. Now, we can sit back and expect capitalist forms somehow to go away—shoo. Again, we’ve seen this play out in real time in history.
Capital cannot be related away, because you cannot socialise your way out of Capitalism, as I wrote elsewhere. By the same token, Communism cannot be signed into existence.
This is the dialectic within Marxism. It’s the productive quagmire we can find ourselves stuck in if we’re not careful. It’s also a dialectic that only becomes more important in our times when technologies of social power seem to reign triumphant.
Let’s consider something that people today can carry around in their pockets. Not mobile phones, but fame. Relational Marxism helps us see that fame is not something a famous person merely possesses. Fame is a socially produced power, one that is built by millions of acts of attention, recognition, and communication.
Fame is a social power, but we can say that fame is at once a form and a social relation. Fame condenses into a form and become a power that is reproduced. If I have millions of likes, I’m going to compel more whenever I post, but we can’t forget that just one or a handful of readers can be an enormous labour of reading for individuals and can positively transform our capacities.
Form Marxism immediately asks: How do the forms organise the power?
Today attention increasingly moves through privately owned platforms. We have our follower counts, advertising markets and algorithms. Power is being digitalised in these forms that then bear down on us to reshape our relationships: people remake who they are for algorithms as even our political systems are reorganised around attention, and owners of infrastructure possess, sell and trade huge social powers that can organise our attention, the visibility we think of in society, and the recognition that we can receive. This has huge flow on effects in our society, as people remake who they are to ever greater degrees.
We need both Marxisms to see the problem.
The same is true of AI, which depends on the accumulated social powers of generations of living beings. AI is language, knowledge, art, science and cooperation produced by many generations that is then turned into a form, one that confronts us as a privately owned platform. It is a form backed by intellectual property and built into infrastructures that more and more structure our everyday lives.
Form Marxism makes us pause to understand who owns these forms, how they are organised by capital and accumulation, and how institutional forms are being transformed to accepted changing social relations. A Relational Marxism, on the other hand, will examine how our capacities are changing, what is happening to how we are knowing, creating, and cooperating together, or resisting. It will ask us to determine what new capacities we might develop as we struggle with these technologies or use them to build new forms.
To what degree is ownership important here? It is very important, but the socialist question for our age must go further: Who has the power to organise our social powers?
Form Marxism and Relational Marxism would have different answers. But neither Marxism is resolvable to the other, and their dialectic is the movement we have been tracing.
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Today the old Marxist oppositions are not longer satisfying me as they once did. Socialism cannot be reduced to the form questions: reform or revolution, centralisation or decentralisation, institution or prefiguration, party or movement? These old distinctions freeze one moment of the dialectic of Marxism and turn it into a doctrine.
Marxism is more interesting when it shows us its moves.
That’s why I think naming Form and Relational Marxism helps. Form Marxism reminds us that capitalist social forms can come to dominate over us. They possess, as a Marxist might say, real objective power. Property as a form of course cannot be wished away. Capital cannot be related away. The dominant forms of our historical moment must be confronted and transformed, along with our relations: states, corporations, markets and infrastructures.
Relational Marxism reminds us that even if we do abolish forms and build new ones, forms cannot make Communism for us. People have to develop the capacities to cooperate or disagree in new ways, rule their own lives collectively, and build the forms that will hold together their collective social powers in ways that they don't return to dominate them.
Social power helps us understand why both relational and form Marxism are true, because relations generate powers; then powers assume forms; and, finally, forms can reorganise relations. Repeat.
This is why revolutionary practice is so critical. Marx in his confrontation with Feuerbach called revolutionary practice the coincidence of changing circumstances and human activity, or self-change.9 Here in brief is one way of expressing the dialectic I have been trying to describe—the human is an ensemble of social relations, as Marx wrote, which is another way of saying both a form and a relation. In praxis, we can transform the objective world and, through that struggle, transform ourselves. And transformed people, as we know, become capable of revolution.
When I was younger, I was not capable of seeing any of this, and so I stared miserably at those schemas in Volume II of Capital. I couldn’t see the social relations, let alone the social powers, in what seemed to me the dead forms of Capitalism.
Communism is not I think the discovery of the correct social form. And it is not the liberation of pure human relationships underneath the ruinous forms of Capitalism. That tension is why this dialectic of Marxism survives. It holds the space we need to learn to become capable of Communism.
Marx imagined “universally developed individuals”, the transformed people who were able to bring their own communal social relations under their “communal control.”10
It’s a beautiful image, but it has always seemed as far off to me as the sky.
Marx, however, could see the stars, and dance.
And these are the constellations, I think, that Marxism allows us to see in the horizon of our own united powers, universally developed, in Communism.
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Marx’s Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right was published in the first and only issue of a German and French journal, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 7 & 10 February 1844 in Paris. Sometimes the line “criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion” is translated as “brain'“, but either away the ambiguous wordplay also suggests leadership like “head” does in English - leading with passion. Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm
Marx's vocabulary of power appears to have changed subtly across his writing. Macht (power), Kraft (force/power), Vermögen (capacity/faculty) and Produktivkraft (productive force/power) overlap in Marx’s writing, but are never exactly same. The Communist Manifesto calls capital a gesellschaftliche Macht (“social power”). Marx in Capital describes cooperation as producing a gesellschaftliche Produktivkraft der Arbeit (“social productive power of labour”). This then appears as Produktivkraft des Kapitals (“productive power of capital”). In my writing at Life Against Capital, I have begun using social power as an organising concept that brings these different meanings together, to hold the tension of analysing Capitalism, but also liberating us from it.
Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845), Thesis VI: “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.” In Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction (1844), Marx had moved Feuerbach’s problem from the “criticism of Heaven” towards the “criticism of Earth.”
I feel that Karl Retter’s critical approach provides some of the most accurate reading of how Marx frames the “capacities of socialized human beings”: “Marx was concerned with detecting the elements in social and economic development that make a liberated society possible. The most important aspect appears to me to be the development of the productive forces of labor. These are not limited to technology, the natural sciences, or communications structures. Productive forces are not things, but capacities of socialized human beings that materialize in things. It is precisely this perspective that Marx calls scientific.” https://viewpointmag.com/2015/10/06/there-is-a-tendency-to-fetishize-the-fetish-an-interview-with-karl-reitter/#f+5017+1+6
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. 13, “Co-operation.” In this passage, the “social productive power of labour” under capitalism appears as “the productive power of capital”, just another way in which social power, which I am using, can be said to be the term that names the ensemble of social relations that can be said to at once feed and also exceed capital.
ibid.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1857–58), “The Chapter on Money”. See also Isaak I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (1928). See also the social form analyses of Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichel.
Marx, Grundrisse. John Holloway’s emphasis on fetishisation is similar to this movement; see Change the World Without Taking Power (2002).
Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, Thesis III.
Marx, Grundrisse, “The Chapter on Money”.
My god what an essay!!! The most brilliant exposition of Marxism I have ever read. I too have to keep reminding myself about the social relations behind the forms and then things make more sense. Thanks a million for this.
I can't tell you how much I loved this.