Saint Jacques: Derrida and the Ghost of Marxism

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Saint Jacques: Derrida and the Ghost of Marxism

David Bedggood
1999

Introduction

     1. For the bourgeoisie, the collapse of "communism" made the
world-historic victory of capitalism seem certain. Yet the
contradictions of capitalism immediately called the new world order
into question as globalisation brought with it what Jacques Derrida
calls the "10 plagues". Apologists for capitalism are now fearful of
the return of Marx's ghost. George Soros sees the ghost in the form of
the anarchy of finance capital. Anthony Giddens sees the ghost in the
rise of left or right fundamentalist ideology. Without realising it,
they pose the problem in terms familiar to Marxists: the contradiction
between dead and living labour and the rise of the dead reclaimed by
the living. But is there a way out for capitalism?

     2. Jacques Derrida enters the fray with his book Specters of
Marx. He returns to Marx, or at least, "one spirit" of Marx in the
German Ideology. This is the "spirit" of Marx which became lost to
totalitarian Marxism -- the "spirit" rediscovered in the extreme
individualism of Max Stirner, who deluded himself that he was a free
floating "unique" ego not subject to any social laws. By reclaiming
the powers of alienated social being from the Hegelian god, Stirner
worshipped his self as his personal god. By rediscovering this
formerly unnoticed "spirit" of Marx, Derrida claims to find a way out
of capitalism's plagues with the call for a "new International". Not a
Marxist International on the side of living labour, but rather a
reworked messianism of the religion of the abstract ego. This is the
path of individual redemption, an expression of the alienation of dead
labour that can never reclaim itself as the spirit of living labour.
In appropriating Marx, Derrida provides the ultimate apology for
capitalist reaction in the name of a "Marx" -- an ideology of personal
religious salvation which serves as a philosophical left cover for the
"Third Way".

     3. In a recent reply to a number of responses to his book,
Derrida re-asserts his messianic claims when he accuses his strongest
critics of being "proprietal" and "patriarchal" under the ghostly
influence of "Marx the father".1 While this is undeserved, I argue
that Derrida's Marxist critics nevertheless fall short of conjuring
away Saint Jacques because they represent the flawed tradition of
Western Marxism -- the failure of materialist dialectics grounded in
the ontology of living labour. Therefore, the Marxist counter to
Derrida's apologetics for capitalism is to be found in reclaiming the
dialectical method that Marx applies in the German Ideology and which
Lukacs, Lenin and Trotsky attempt to develop in the unity of theory
and practice of the revolutionary party.

Post-Marxist Apologists for the New World Disorder

     4. George Soros, one of the richest men in the world, has spent
millions trying to restore capitalism in Russia. But he lost much of
his money with the collapse of the Russian economy in August 1998. He
claims that the global finance system is out of control and needs to
be regulated. His calls for a return to an "international" like
Bretton Woods, or some body attached to the IMF, have been echoed with
increasing frequency after the so-called Asian "meltdown". His fear is
that the casino of finance capital will bring an end to the new world
order and the return to anarchy and revolution.2 If Soros fears the
collapse of the new world order, Tony Giddens, the apostle of the
post-scarcity global society, claims that the new world order can be
managed by social scientists as advisers to the politicians of the
"Third Way".3 The recent discussions between Soros and Giddens about
the unstable state of the world are premised on the "death" and
"burial" of socialism.4 Giddens believes that socialism has been
banished: ". . . the spectre which disturbed the slumbers of bourgeois
Europe for more than seventy years . . . has been returned to its
nether world".5

     5. Yet it seems that these speeches at the graveside of Marxism
are premature. The ghost of Marxism continues to haunt the big
bourgeoisie despite every effort to exorcise it. The Communist
Manifesto is being fleshed out as never before by a capitalist world
system out of control. The end of the cold war and collapse of
"communism" has allowed capitalism unrivalled domination over its
"other". Yet everywhere the forces of disorder manifest themselves --
from the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union,
the instability of the "Middle East" and Central Asia, to the renewed
worker and peasant uprisings in Latin America and South Asia. It is in
the face of such rampant disorder and deepening divisions that a more
robust defence of capitalism is required. In order to exorcise the
ghost of communism, it is necessary to provide a philosophy of
rebellion and redemption that can empower the intelligentsia to
confuse and disorient the masses. Post-Marxism and the new liberalism
of the centre need an anti-foundationist foundation. Post-Marxism
needs a new priesthood.6

     6. If Soros is its financier and Giddens its sociologist, then
perhaps Derrida is the philosopher of post-Marxism.7 His mission? The
"new middle" needs to pre-empt the left not merely by declaring Marx
dead (since who has seen the body?), but by res-erecting the body of
the father as the son -- Derrida! From the safety of "After the fall"
(of "communism"), Jacques Derrida, darling of the post-structuralists
writes Specters of Marx, claiming that we are all in "debt" to Marxism
as the New World Disorder crumbles.8 Derrida asks, "Where is Marxism
going? Where are we going with it?" He recounts how he re-read The
Communist Manifesto after some decades. "I knew very well there was a
ghost waiting there, and from the opening, from the raising of the
curtain. Now, of course, I have just discovered, in truth I have just
remembered what must have been, haunting my memory: the first noun of
the Manifesto, and this time in the singular, is 'specter': 'A Specter
is haunting Europe ­ the specter of communism'".9 Derrida's salutes
Marx and reveals his desire to reclaim at least "one spirit" of Marx
by de-totalising Marx-ISM.10

         Upon re-reading the Manifesto and a few other great works of
Marx, I said to myself that I know of few texts in the philosophical
tradition, perhaps none, whose lesson seemed more urgent today,
provided that one take into account what Marx and Engels themselves
say (for example in Engel's "Preface" to the 1888 re-edition) about
their own possible "aging" and their intrinsically irreducible
historicity. What other thinker has ever issued a similar warning in
such an explicit fashion? Who has ever called for the transformation
to come of his own theses? Not only in view of some progressive
enrichment of knowledge, which would change nothing in the order of a
system, but so as to take into account there, another account, the
effects of rupture and restructuration? And so as to incorporate in
advance, beyond any possible programming, the unpredictability of new
knowledge, new techniques and new givens? No text in the tradition
seems as lucid concerning the way in which the political is becoming
worldwide, concerning the irreducibility of the technical and the
media in the current of the most thinking thought -- and this goes
beyond the railroad and the newspapers of the time whose powers were
analysed in such an incomparable way in the Manifesto. And few texts
have shed so much light on law, international law, and nationalism.11

     7. Derrida repeats the familiar refrain that Marxism is
transformed as society is transformed. But what social transformations
is he talking about? The power of Marxism to predict the changes
Derrida talks of -- in politics, technology and media -- comes from
the method of abstraction which uncovers the developmental dynamic of
capitalism and its laws of motion. Marx expected that Marxism would
disappear along with the withering of the state under socialism. Yet
neither capitalism nor Marxism has been fundamentally transformed
despite the rush of ex-Marxists into the post-al camp.12 However,
Derrida believes that there is a "Marxism" that can be true to
transformed capitalism. It was the "Marxism" that Marx denied at
birth. So Derrida wants to magically "transform" Marxism at its
inception. He wants to reclaim the "memory" of Marxism from the
doctrinaires, and to produce a new Marx for the "future".

         It will always be a fault not to read and re-read and discuss
Marx -- which is to say also a few others -- and to go beyond
scholarly "reading" or "discussion". It will be more and more a fault,
a failing of theoretical, philosophical, political responsibility.
When the dogma machine and the "Marxist" ideological apparatuses
(States, parties, cells, unions, and other places of doctrinal
production) are in the process of disappearing, we no longer have any
excuse, only alibis, for turning away from this responsibility. There
will be no future without this. Not without Marx, no future without
Marx, without the memory and the inheritance of Marx: in any case a
certain Marx, or his genius, of at least one of his spirits. For this
will be our hypothesis or rather our bias: there is more than one of
them, there must be more than one of them.13

     8. Derrida recognises that the end of "official" Marxism has left
a political vacuum to be filled. He is appalled at the apparent
victory of the new right and wants to reclaim Marxism to bolster the
appeal of deconstruction.14 He will do this by recouping "one of
[Marx's] spirits" conjured up from his youth which will bear a
striking resemblance to deconstruction. Derrida recognises the
"inheritance" of Marxism that cannot be wished away by the "end of
ideologists". He knows because he opposed official Marxism in his
youth, and it still haunts him.

         Nevertheless, among all the temptations I will have to resist
today, there would be the temptation of memory: to recount what was
for me, and for those of my generation, who shared it during a whole
lifetime, the experience of Marxism, the quasi-paternal figure of
Marx, the way it fought in us with other filiations, the reading of
texts and the interpretation of the world in which the Marxist
inheritance was -- and still remains, and so it will remain --
absolutely and thoroughly determinate. One need not be a Marxist or a
communist in order to accept this obvious fact. We all live in a
world, some would say a culture, that still bears, at an incalculable
depth, the mark of this inheritance, whether in a directly visible
fashion or not. Among the traits that characterise a certain
experience that belongs to my generation, that is, an experience that
will have lasted at least forty years, and which is not over, I will
isolate first of all a troubling paradox. I am speaking of a troubling
effect of "déjà vu", and even of a certain "toujours déjà vu". I
recall this malaise of perception, hallucination, and time because of
the theme that brings us together this evening: "wither Marxism?" For
many of us the question has the same age as we do. In particular for
those who, and this was also my case, opposed, to be sure, de facto
"Marxism" or "communism" (the Soviet Union, the International of
Communist Parties, and everything that resulted from them, which is to
say so very many things), but intended at least never to do so out of
conservative or reactionary motivations or even moderate right-wing or
republican positions.15

     9. Derrida knows that Marxism will not "wither" even as its
official versions have been declared dead and buried. This is because
Marxism is as "alive" as the historic struggle between dead and living
labour is "alive".16 The ghost of Marxism has returned to haunt
Sorosian capitalism today where hot money 30 times the dollar value of
world trade is flooding around the world speculating in exchange
rates. That ghost is all that alienated, dead labour coming home to
haunt the bourgeoisie as speculative capital.17

     10. The growth of speculative capital represents the
overproduction of capital incapable of mobilising sufficient living
labour to produce more alienated surplus-value because of insufficient
profits. Overproduction of capital can be in commodity form
represented by gluts that cannot find a market. It is expressed also
as money capital, which cannot find a profitable productive
investment. So the "out of control" growth of the financial system is
ultimately a symptom of the necessary overproduction of capital.
Similarly the threat of fundamentalism is a consequence of the
inherent crisis and anarchy of capitalist production. The real spectre
is and remains the spectre of communism. It is this fear of the return
of the spectre that unites Soros, Giddens and Derrida as "ideologists"
of post-Marxist apologetics of the "new middle" that now seeks to
replace the neo-liberal ascendancy.18

The Ghost of Dead Labour

     11. Under capitalism, "dead labour" is all the accumulated value
of past labour owned as capital. It is owned as the private property
of the capitalist class. Dead labour is therefore the accumulation of
past living labour. It is in contradiction with living labour -- the
working class that daily produces more value. Dead labour is in
contradiction with living labour because it is used to increase
production of use-values only if it realises an exchange-value and
creates a profit. This contradiction means that the accumulation of
alienated dead labour is at the expense of the consumption of
use-values to meet the needs of living labour. Production for profits
starves the consumption (and therefore reproduction) of labour-power
as a use value. The contradiction can only be resolved when living
labour reclaims its dead labour and frees up its capacity to produce
use-values to meet the needs of all. Arising out of these social
relations of production, alienation is the "human" condition of
capitalism. It represents the "spectre" of past labour that comes back
to haunt the bourgeoisie in the form of proletarian revolution.19

     12. Alienation is the state of being separated from your self.
Marx says that humans live by their labour and by consuming the fruits
of their labour, or they die. Therefore to be separated from your
labour and its fruits is to be separated or estranged from your self.
The "self" which bourgeois intellectuals today mystify as "identity"
or "lifestyle" is empty, phoney, because it is not produced through
our labour. Rather our ersatz "self" is passively reconstituted when
we consume our alienated labour as reified commodities.20 Instead of
seeing that it is our labour that is the value in the "things", these
"things" appear to have value in themselves. Social relations of
production become inverted as social relations between "things". Marx
calls this commodity fetishism. Who we are, and what we are, is
therefore the product of what we consume as alienated values. Because
our labour and its value is alienated so is everything else. Money is
now everything. I am, as Marx says, my hip pocket. I "shop therefore I
am".21

     13. At the root of what is rotten about capitalism is the
separation of workers from their labour so that they do not control
the fruits of their labour. This means that they have lost any control
over their lives. The less control they have the more they look for
alien forces as the forces which determine their fate, or in
desperation they challenge fate by appealing to the irrationality of
chance or good luck. Under the grip of alien forces they are incapable
of recognising that they are mere projections of their own power. They
fail to see that they externalise their power to fate, chance, God etc
as alien and outside their control. Is it not surprising that appeals
to irrational, supernatural, out-of-world experiences, mysticism, and
post-modernism, become alibis for not taking control of our-selves?
The alienated bourgeois subject staring into the mirror! What the
bourgeois fear is what they do not see in the mirror -- the ghost of
dead labour that haunts them; yet it will disappear only when living
labour re-expropriates its dead labour and abolishes capital in a
social revolution.

     14. That is why for ideological reactionaries today the spectre
is still proletarian "communism". In the language of conservative
neo-Hegelians like Fukuyama, it is the totality of the working class
essence (forms of which appear as "socialist", environmentalist,
religious fundamentalism, etc.) posing a threat to the unique, finite
freedom of the bourgeois subject, i.e. capital. Derrida demolishes
Fukuyama as an objective idealist incapable of providing a rationale
to defend democracy and human rights.22 This because such a "perfect
liberal democracy" is in "contradiction" with the real world of the
"10 plagues", and cannot therefore persuade anyone that the "end of
history" has arrived.23 But more than this, Hegelian idealism is
another totalitarian system which has to be rejected along with its
cross cousin, dialectical materialism.

     15. Similarly, post-modernism's ghost is too abstract for
Derrida's purposes because it repudiates the Enlightenment project and
humanism as totality. It tries to gloss over capitalism's
contradictions and to present the commodification of the world as
personal redemption. This retreat into an elitist consumption culture
and identify politics is too crude to contain the masses who are
deprived of use-values. We shall see that the precise point at which
Derrida appropriates Marxism is his rejection of the ontology of
labour as a use-value. This is to eliminate labour as productive of
commodities to meet the needs of wage-labour. For to allow labour as
use-value to remain as a necessary condition of capitalism is to
recognise the necessary contradiction between the reproduction of
society (forces of production) and the demands of capital accumulation
(relations of production). Such a contradiction drives the laws of
motion of capital and its intensifying periodic crises. This is what
makes capitalism a transient, historical mode of production, which
produces the pre-requisites for the collective transformation of
capitalist social relations.

     16. By conjuring away the real ghost of use-value, Derrida
eliminates the material basis of social determinism that can undermine
and threaten the messianic performance of the bourgeois individual.24
He eliminates it as labour both in the form of living labour
appropriated as commodities, and as dead labour, appropriated in the
past as the accumulated material/technical wealth of the productive
forces. Therefore the new challenge of capitalism in decline is for
its ideologists to appropriate "Marxism" in the name of "radical"
democracy ie. bourgeois individualism. There is a need for more
subtlety; for an 'indirect apologetics' which takes capitalism's
"plagues", and attempts to explain them as ethical sins that can be
redeemed by the pure moral intentions of "responsible"
intellectuals.25 There is a need for a post-Marxism that can claim to
be both post- and 'radical' ie. true to Marx. This requires a new
initiative to restore Marx to his "self".

     17. Derrida, following the "death of Marxism", tries to marry
"one spirit" of Marx to deconstruction by repudiating Marx's ontology
of living and dead labour as the social forces shaping the lives of
alienated bourgeois individuals. As I hope to show, this 'take' on the
humanist "spirit" of young Marx, attempts to recoup the subjective
idealism of Max Stirner as that of the young Marx also. To help make
this point I will critique a number of critics of Derrida's recent
"turn" to Marxism to show that they all fail to recognise the deeply
reactionary project lying at the heart of Derrida's "spirit" of Marx.26

Derrida's Critics

     18. It is interesting to see how Derrida's critics interpret his
(re)turn to Marx. Eagleton makes some caustic comments on Derrida's
"opportunism", his "academicist fantasy that he has somehow mistaken
for an enlightened anti-Stalinism". He makes fun of Derrida: "It is
the ultimate post-structuralist fantasy: an opposition without
anything as distastefully systemic or drably 'orthodox' as an
opposition, a dissent beyond all formulable discourse, a promise which
would betray itself in the act of fulfilment, a perpetual excited
openness to the Messiah who had better not let us down by doing
anything as determinate as coming".27 Yet Eagleton does not pursue
Derrida's political purpose in re-fashioning the de-totalised Young Marx.

     19. Spivak, the "Marxist" most sympathetic to Derrida has tried
for 10 years or more to marry Derrida to a deconstructed Marx.28 Her
purpose is to rid Marx of what she sees as the idealist hangover of an
undercover humanist universalism. But in the process she turns Marx
into a Feuerbach who sees some abstract Enlightenment social essence
(the unity of "nature" and "reason") which can only be realised in the
intellect.29 Spivak picks up on several shortcomings in Derrida's
treatment of Marx. He denies the dual nature of the commodity and
counter-poses use-value as the future release from exchange-value.
Socially necessary labour time is not the measure of value. He
universalises money as capital so his brand of utopian socialism is to
remove money -- exchange-value -- and replace it with use-values.
(Remember the attack on Proudhon in the opening passages of the
Grundrisse.) To extend Spivak's critique further, Derrida's discourse
on the 'new world disorder' reduces to a critique of unequal exchange
-- not of labour values but of money "values" or prices as determined
by the market.30 This means that insofar as "exploitation" exists it
results from individuals buying commodities cheap and selling them
dear. Equitable consumption then becomes a matter of caveat emptor.
This reduces ideologically to performativity as "market choice"
similar to that of Hayek or the "negative freedom" of Berlin.

     20. Spivak's blind spot on Marx is her view that the
contradiction between use-value and exchange-value is not a real
contradiction that motivates the class struggle. She thinks that Marx
sets up the goalposts of a socialist "society" at which we take aim by
intellectually overcoming of the shortfall of reason with doses of
political dogma. This is the familiar post-structuralist critique of
totalising Marxism as yet another Enlightenment teleology that has to
fail.31 Marx, however, argued against idealist conceptions of
revolution. The contradiction between use-value and exchange-value
was, and is, a real contradiction. It is class struggle at the point
of production and not in the academy that motivates capitalism's
crisis-ridden development. The limits to capitalism's development will
be decided by the practical struggle of the proletariat, and not by
philosophers. While Spivak picks up on some of Derrida's obvious
"mistakes" she misses the main one -- that the purpose of Marxism is
not merely to interpret the world but to change it.32

     21. Thus Spivak's blind spot obscures the real source of
Derrida's weakness in his fixation on Stirner. She attempts to
"correct" Derrida conceptually, but cannot understand why he
"mistakes" Marx. This is because these are not "mistakes", but the
result of deliberately "excluding" the spirits of labour, class, the
"party", etc., i.e. the "totalitarian Marx". Because Derrida is
obsessed by these evil spirits, he cannot follow Marx into the
Grundrisse or Capital to demonstrate the material laws of motion that
elaborate and pose the practical resolution of the real contradiction
between use-value and exchange-value as social revolution. Derrida
purposely excludes these unwanted spirits so that he can recover the
pure spirit of rebellion against "evil" in the acts of faith of
individuals taking "responsibility" (weak messianic force).

     22. Jameson, too, is sympathetic. While driven to explain
post-modernism as a cultural expression of late capitalism (or more
recently finance capital) Jameson has no brief to unite Derrida and
Marx. Yet he finds Derrida's fixation on the young Marx refreshing. He
seems to endorse Derrida's position on "messianism" shorn of the
"apocalyptic" ontological certainties of Marxism. He accepts that
Derrida's appeal to the "messianic" is akin to that of Benjamin's
"weak messianic power".33 Here he is referring to Benjamin's
conception of revolution as the "unexpected" as opposed to the
Stalinist and Social Democratic "rhetoric of historic inevitability".
Jameson sees in Derrida's return to the young Marx a way of conceiving of

    post-modern virtuality, a daily spectrality that undermines the
present and the real without any longer attracting attention at all;
it marks the originality of our social situation, but no-one (before
Derrida) has re-identified it as a very old thing in quite this
dramatic way -- it is the emergence, at the very end of Derrida's
book, of spectrality, of the messianic, as "the differantial
deployment of the tekhne, of techno science of tele-technology".
Perhaps we need something similar here: Marx's purloined letter: a
whole new programme in itself surely, a wandering signifier capable of
keeping any number of conspiratorial futures alive.34

     23. This limp solidarity with Derrida's radical indeterminacy
fits with Ebert's assessment that for Jameson consumption is the
"basis for capital accumulation in postmodernism". "Jameson offers a
model of the mode of production that erases the appropriation of
surplus labour just as thoroughly as does Baudrillard's hyperreal
semiotic system".35 Ebert does not expand on Jameson's preference for
the consumption moment over the production moment. I think it can be
found in his adoption of Mandel's theory of Late Capitalism.36 Because
Mandel makes crisis contingent on many causes including
underconsumption he opens the door for Jameson to develop his
consumptionist explanation of post-modernism.37

     24. More recently Jameson has moved further away from Marx by
adopting Arrighi's model of capitalist development which separates and
isolates the overproduction of MC as "finance capital" as a definite
stage in the cycle of capitalist development.38 The effect is to shift
the cause of the post-modern cultural turn from the drive to consume
to the drive to speculate which becomes further separated from the
production moment and production relations. The ills of capitalism in
its current historical context are seen to be the result of the
decline of US hegemony caused by the rise of financial speculation.
There is no Marxist conception of the fundamental causes the financial
speculation itself, or how this will "determine" a crisis of
capitalist production relations and the re-emergence of the
enlightenment project as socialist revolution. It is not surprising
then that Jameson cannot account for much that is going on in the
world and finds Derrida's appeal to the "virtuality" of the
"always-now" attractive.39

     25. Fletcher gets closer to Derrida/Stirner's extreme
individualism. Fletcher argues that Derrida is reclaiming the Young
Hegelian Marx but with a Stirner twist. Derrida collapses modernity
into the abstract "past-present-future". The abandonment of any
historicity of social relations for an ahistorical metaphysics of time
allows him to set up a surreptitious "transcendental hauntology"
against ontology -- which he sees as metaphysics ie. the attempt to
exorcise hauntology.40 Yet obviously Derrida is privileging a
meta-ontology which says that egos are shapeless and empty of
substance or presence unless formed by a succession of irreducible
acts (differance).

     26. So hauntology is a subversive meta-narrative which says that
in history there is no objective or material reality such as the
necessity of social relations, only a reality which is the projection
of the indeterminate (free will) ego. Any ontology that specifies
"being" in relation to social essences, including social relations, is
pre-empted by a bogus anti-essential ghosts-in-general/hauntology. In
other words there is no "essence" beyond the individual who can
perceive and understand social relations only as a sequence of
indeterminate acts of "free will", i.e. market choice. Any attempt to
give this indeterminate chaos substance as a collective, universal
essence is to engage in metaphysics -- i.e., ghosts. Derrida writes:

         What is a ghost? What is the effectivity or the presence of a
specter, that is, for what seems to remain as ineffective, virtual,
insubstantial as a simulacrum? . . . Let us call it a hauntology. This
logic of haunting would not be merely larger and more powerful than an
ontology or a thinking of Being. It would harbour within itself, but
like circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and
teleology themselves.41

     27. By coining a term "hauntology" to exorcise the ghosts of
Enlightenment determinism, Derrida must pre-empt the ontological (and
epistemological) assumptions of "being" (rationality) by
counter-posing a radical "essence" of "nothingness" (irrationality).
Here he borrows from Heidegger.42

     28. Derrida draws on Heidegger in particular in his reference to
the notion that the "time is out of joint". It is an attempt to
explain how the "present" is formed out of the actions of individuals
not 'caused' by past or future, but for whom the present is shaped by
indeterminate "traces", i.e. before society, before psychology, etc.
Derrida refers to Hamlet and his predicament (" time is out of joint")
to suggest that the "disjointure" of past present and future can only
be "rejoined" in acts of pure justice. Heidegger calls this
irreducible act a "gift" meaning it has no market or exchange value.
Of this Derrida says:

    There is first of all a gift without restitution, without
calculation, without accountability. Heidegger thus removes such gift
from any horizon of culpability, of debt, of right, and even, perhaps
of duty. . . . Beyond right, and still more beyond juridicism, beyond
morality, and still more beyond moralism, does not justice as relation
to the other suppose on the contrary the irreducible excess of a
disjointure or an anachrony, some Un-Fuge, some "out of joint"
dislocation in Being and in time itself, a disjointure that, in always
risking the evil, expropriation, and injustice against which there is
no calculable insurance, would alone be able to do justice or to
render justice. . . . Otherwise justice risks being reduced once again
to juridical-moral rules, norms or representations, within an
inevitably totalising horizon (movement for adequate restitution,
expiation, or reappropriation).43

     29. Derrida then goes on to explain how such pure acts can
realise social justice.44 The "Messianic: the coming of the other, the
absolute and unpredictable singularity of the arrivant as justice".
This is the "ineffaceable mark" of "Marx's legacy". Following
Blanchard's "Marx's Three Voices", Derrida says that Marx asks us:

    Not to maintain together the disparate, but to put ourselves there
where the disparate itself holds together, without wounding the
dis-jointure, the dispersion, or the difference, without effacing the
heterogeneity of the other. We are asked (enjoined perhaps) to turn
ourselves over to the future, to join ourselves in this we, there
where the disparate is turned over to this singular joining, without
conception or certainty of determination, without knowledge, without
or before the synthetic junction of the conjunction and the
disjunction. The Alliance of a rejoining without conjoined mate,
without organisation, without party, without nation, without state,
without property (the "communism" that we will later nickname the new
International)".45

     30. This attempt to use Heidegger to read Marx backwards as a
deconstructionist also explains what he finds useful in the extreme
egoism of Max Stirner.46 Derrida fixes on Stirner because Stirner
learned to live with, and like, his "spooks", i.e. the "spirit" of his
unique ego -- the pre-social, pre-religious, pre-everything act of
self-determination.47 In Stirner's mind these acts are the irreducible
effects/spectres of his own egoistic being, messianic eschatology and
teleology even. The absolute ideal becomes the "unique" ego. These
"spooks" are not "totalities" coming back to haunt the ruling class
because there is no class and no rule, in fact no society even. All
there is is the uniquely posited pre-social individual and his (sic)
"own" property.48

     31. Fletcher suggests that Derrida gets into retro mode at a
point when Marx made the decisive break with the Young Hegelians who
had yet to expunge religion (alienation) from their cult of humanity.
But more than this, I argue that Derrida recuperates a pre-Marxist
Stirnerian anarchism and projects it forwards not only as an antidote
to totalitarian Marxism in the present (which is largely defunct) but
more importantly to any revival of revolutionary Marxism in the
future. By selecting a voluntarist "spirit" of the young Marx, Derrida
regresses into the pre-history of Western Marxism and defaults into a
form of liberal anarchism.

Why Stirner?

     32. Stirner is usually seen as an anarchist who in rejecting
Hegel takes subjective idealism to its extreme.49 In so doing, Stirner
exposes some of the weakness of the Left Hegelians and forces Marx to
make a complete break with idealism.50 That is why it is Stirner and
not Feuerbach or Bauer, who becomes the main target of Marx's
ferocious critique in The German Ideology.51 Marx's critique of
Stirner is motivated by the appeal that Stirner's brand of radical
egoism has against his own materialist method and politics. This
seductive idealism had to be pulled out at the roots. Marx goes for
the throat of Saint Max Stirner.

         We spoke above of the German philosophical conception of
history. Here, in Saint Max we find a brilliant example of it. The
speculative idea, the abstract conception, is made the driving force
of history, and history is thereby turned into the mere history of
philosophy. But even the latter is not conceived as, according to
existing sources, it actually took place -- not to mention how it
evolved under the influence of real historical relations -- but as it
was understood and described by recent German philosophers, in
particular Hegel and Feuerbach. And from these descriptions again only
that was selected which could be adapted to the given end, and which
came into the hands of our saint by tradition. Thus, history becomes a
mere history of illusory ideas, a history of spirits and ghosts, while
the real, empirical history that forms the basis of this ghostly
history is only utilised to provide bodies for these ghosts; from it
are borrowed the names required to clothe these ghosts with the
appearance of reality. In making this experiment our saint frequently
forgets his role and writes an undisguised ghost-story.52

     33. Stirner's peculiar brand of ghost story in which realism and
idealism are historically unified as "egoism" is just another "dishing
up" of a "tedious" and "boring" speculative history, says Marx.
"Moreover, the strong competition among the German speculative
philosophers makes it the duty of each new competitor to offer an
ear-splitting historical advertisement for his commodity".53 Having
noted that even in 1845 philosophers were commodifying their
speculations, an insight that applies even more to recent French
philosophy, Marx proceeds to take apart the use-value of Stirner's
commodity phrase by phrase.

     34. Stirner's egoism is an idealist fiction, itself as much an
"essence" as the religious conventions he assails. "How little it
occurs to him to make each "unique" the measure of his own uniqueness,
how much he uses his own uniqueness as a measure, a moral norm to be
applied to other individuals, like a true moralist, forcing them into
his Procrustean bed".54 His notion of the "individual" is shorn of
social relations and so reproduces an "association of egoists" as an
"ideal copy of capitalist society, of Hegel's civil society". Marx
jokes that Stirner, "would be allocated a place in the capitalist
division of labour", of which he is totally ignorant.55 In destroying
Stirner's notion of "freedom of labour" as "free competition of
workers among themselves", Marx develops his concept of abstract
labour.56 In his demolition of Stirner's "rebellion" and rejection of
"communism", Marx offers a dialectical and historical conception of
the individual whose self-activity and self-realisation is achieved by
the transformation of social relations in practice.57 "Modern
universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals . . . only when
controlled by all. . . . Only at this stage, does self-self activity
coincide with material life, which corresponds to the development of
individuals into complete individuals. . . . The transformation of
labour into self-activity corresponds to the transformation of the
earlier limited intercourse into the intercourse of individuals as
such".58

     35. For Derrida, however, Marx's critique (his ontological
response to Stirner's mystification of labour) entailed the
"totalising horizon" of an essential "communism", conceived by Marx in
the German Ideology, but realised as the actually existing communism
of the 20th century. For Derrida, this vindicates Stirner's objection
to "communism" as doing "violence to the individual's freedom",
against Marx's fundamental critique of Stirner's egoism, which takes
as its starting point the "unfreedom" of labour under capitalism.59
Thus for Derrida, Marx fear of the ghost/void of the "unique" ego lead
him to posit "unfree labour" as a totalitarian essence. To follow
Stirner, Marx should have responded not by "filling in a void" but by
"increasingly emptying it out".60 Here the "void" is the indeterminacy
of society represented by "spectrality" and exercise of "hauntology"
against all totalising operations in ghost-busting. But Marx's
critique of Stirner/Derrida is precisely to "fill in the void" with
the knowledge of the social relations which determine the "being" in
front of its "consciousness" so that the real specter of "dead labour"
can be brought back to life.

     36. So it seems that Derrida has put his finger on what was a
decisive turning point in Marx's shift from post-Hegelian idealism to
historical materialism. Marx was determined to overcome alienation by
recognising its material other -- "unfree labour" -- rooted in the
social relations of production. Derrida senses that this is the
crucial point at which Marx defeats subjective idealism. So he wants
to undermine the adoption of the philosophical method of dialectical
materialism in its embryonic form. He wants to get in at the
beginnings of Marxism so as to abort any rebirth of historical
materialism out of the ashes of Stalinism and Menshevik Western
Marxism. He must do this by inserting a subjective idealism that is
congenial to the post-modern petty bourgeois' desire for personal
salvation in the age of the new world disorder.

     37. Callinicos and Eagleton suggest that something of this sort
is Derrida's purpose but don't pursue the argument further. Callinicos
is correct to point to the absence of any link between Derrida's
"messianic eschatology" and "any theoretical understanding of the
dynamics of historical transformation".61 "Marx thus relies, according
to Derrida, on "an ontology of presence as actual reality and as
objectivity relative to which spectres and other forms of
representation of the absent can be 'conjured away' by being reduced
to their material conditions, the world of labour, production, and
exchange".62

     38. So how is it that Derrida can make such a belated
reconciliation with "one-spirit" of Marx? What was he doing when
others such as Althusser attempted to rescue Marxism from Stalinism?
Derrida, after all, is proud to state that he opposed "everything" to
do with Marxism for twenty years.63 He supported the cause of Chris
Hani in South Africa, but who to the left of Kissinger did'nt?
Callinicos cannot come up with any real explanation for Derrida's
renewed interest in Marxism. Callinicos own stalinophobic politics is
a blind spot, which obscures the reason Derrida could not take up an
active anti-Stalinist stand such as that of Trotsky's "Fourth
International". Like Derrida, Callinicos was taken by surprise at the
collapse of Stalinism. Neither had a theoretical basis on which to
predict the outcomes in the Stalinist states; how could there be a
counter-revolution in the counter-revolution? Hence the unexpected
counter-revolutions of 1989.64

     39. In my opinion, this is a telling point against Callinicos'
own Marxism. On the one hand, Derrida is a subjective idealist. He
wants to free the authentic act of the ego from any social
determination. Ultimately this freedom is a religious experience -- in
which Stirner's free ego is the pure expression of messianic
salvation.65 On the other hand, Callinicos' rejection of Marx's
analysis of the determinate effects of commodity fetishism on
consciousness traps him in an equally idealist position of the
spontaneously class conscious proletariat.66 For me this explains why
Callinicos can only take his critique of Derrida so far. To take it
any further would require an overcoming of the idealist baggage that
both Derrida and Callinicos, in their own way, bring from Western
Marxism.67

     40. Eagleton criticises Jameson's "summary treatment" of
Derrida's politics in defending Derrida's brand of "left"
deconstruction opposing "post-Marxism" and attacks on Althusser. Yet,
he says, "Derrida's 'left' deconstruction seems no more than a 'left
liberalism', well meaning, flexible, participatory if somewhat
theoretically diffuse political programmes of the traditional New
Left. Is there to be a Deconstructive Party alongside the Democrats,
or is the encounter between Marxism and deconstruction not that kind
of thing at all?"68 ". . . Derrida has turned to Marxism just when it
has become marginal, and so, in his post-structuralist reckoning,
rather more alluring. (He has in fact no materialist or historical
analysis of Stalinism whatsoever as opposed to an ethical rejection of
it)".69

     41. Eagleton recognises that it is no coincidence that Derrida
rediscovers the early Marx just as the "late" Marx of the Second
International, and the Stalinist Third International, has been
certified dead and buried. He can see that Derrida wants to reclaim
that part of Marx that retrospectively makes deconstruction the
genuine Marxism. Yet Eagleton fails completely to see what is at stake
here. Derrida's is not merely an intellectual exercise in which
deconstruction becomes the 'new' new left fashion any more than
Stirner's unique was the fashion in young Hegelian circles. It may be
that Stalinism and Second International menshevism have suffered an
historic defeat, but that is not to say that the idealist method (the
totalised Marx) which underpins Western Marxism is dead.

     42. More important, the re-emergence of capitalist crisis
tendencies carries the threat of a renewal of revolutionary Marxism.
So it seems to me that in anticipation of this contest, Derrida, like
other post-Marxist ideologues, is insinuating himself into the lineage
of Western Marxism at the point of its inception to claim the
franchise on genuine Marxism. Therefore the appropriation of
Stirnerian "rebellion" as a deconstruction of materialist ontology is
a conscious attempt to install an anti-materialist subjective idealist
"spirit" of Marxism against the time and place of the revival of
revolutionary Marxism.

>>From Pre- to Post-Marx via Benjamin?

     43. The attempts by Laclau and Critchely to recruit Derrida to a
self-conscious post-Marxism support this view. Their shift towards
indeterminacy and contingency is on a convergence course with
Derrida's rejection of "totalitarian" Marxism.70 Laclau is optimistic
that "deconstruction can present itself both as a moment of its
inscription in the Marxist tradition as well as a point of
turning/deepening/supersession of the latter". For Laclau, the true
Marxist tradition is the "Sorelian-Gramscian" line within Western
Marxism where "material forces" become "loose and indeterminate", and
where the "distinction between the ethical and political becomes
blurred".71 Negri's position is similar. He chides Derrida for his
nostalgia, but commends him for producing a "new theory of
spectrality, which corresponds with common experience: an experience
of the everyday, and/or the masses, the experience of a mobile,
flexible, computerized, immaterialized and spectral labour".72 In
other words there is a shift from objective idealism: fate, the
proletarian mission, etc to subjective idealism. After all, if
"material forces" become contingent, and indeed Marxism becomes one of
many "emancipations", who or what is the revolutionary subject?

     44. Lukacs makes the point about bourgeois apologetics at the
beginning of the imperialist epoch that it is an elite philosophy of
the 'parasitic intelligentsia' who in response to the crises of war
and revolution set out to "philosophically demolish dialetictics and
historical materialism" by "incorporating its 'serviceable' and
suitably 'purified' elements".73 Similarly, in the currrent period of
late imperialist crisis the role of 'revolutionary subject' falls by
default to the counter-hegemonic intellectual/priest who infiltrates
the camp of the class enemy, and articulates indeterminacy as a "weak
messianic power". This is a direct reference to Derrida's supposed
affinity with Benjamin in an attempt to incorporate his "seviceable"
and "purified" elements to bolster Derrida's post-"Marxist" credentials.

     45. While Jameson takes Derrida's appeal to Benjamin seriously
Callinicos is not taken in. He argues that Derrida's attraction for
Stirner fits with the latter's "proto-Nietzschean tone". He comments:
"One might say that the poststructuralist discovery of Stirner was
bound to happen sooner or later". By comparison, Benjamin's "tortuous,
ambiguous, but ultimately decisive moment towards revolutionary
socialism and historical materialism -- showed that the reverse is
true, that 'messianic extremity' requires a materialist anchorage".74
Yet Callinicos does not speculate about why it is necessary for
Derrida, as opposed to poststructuralism in general, to rediscover
Stirner as "proto Nietzschean" and still make a gesture towards
Benjamin the genuine Marxist.75 Either Benjamin is not a real Marxist
or Derrida is.

     46. But Derrida's gesture towards Benjamin is rhetorical, since
his conception of the "messianic" is very different from that of
Benjamin, who takes as read Marx's critique of Stirner's
"rebellion".76 In his recent response to his interlocuters, Derrida
clarifies what he means by 'messianic'. This is a "messianicity
without messianism" -- i.e. messianicity without a messiah, without
utopia.

         Nothing could be further from Utopia and Utopianism, even in
its "subterranean" form, than the messianicity and spectrality which
are at the heart of Specters of Marx. While Benjamin still has traces
of Jewish and Marxist "messianism" . . . messianicity (which I regard
as a universal structure of experience, and which cannot be reduced to
religious messianism of any stripe) is anything but Utopian: it
refers, in every here-now, to the coming of an eminently real,
concrete event, that is, to the most irreducibly heterogenous
otherness. Nothing is more "realistic" or "immediate" than this
messianic apprehension, straining forward toward the event of him
who/that which is coming . . . messianicity mandates that we interrupt
the ordinary course of things, time and history here-now: it is
inseparable from an affirmation of otherness and justice. As this
unconditional messianicity must therefore negotiate its conditions in
one or other singular, practical situation, we have to do here with
the locus of an analysis and evaluation, and therefore of a
responsibility.77

     47. There is clearly a massively subjective idealist project
here. The "unconditional messianicity" as the "universal structure of
experience" is devoid of social relations (and is therefore a
void/specter) and is wholly self-driven like the sovereign consumer of
bourgeois ideology. The "affirmations" of "otherness", "justice"
(meaning the gift without obligation) is the substance of social
responsibility. No wonder Derrida thinks that Benjamin's messianism
has some way to go before it arrives at "messianicity". Meanwhile
Derrida merely suggests a "possible convergence" between himself and
Benjamin. He wonders:

         If Benjamin does not link the privileged moments of this
"weak messianic power" to determinate historico-political phases, or,
indeed crises. . . . Thus there would be, for Benjamin critical
moments (pre-revolutionary or post-revolutionary). moments of hope or
disappointment, in short, dead ends during which a simalcrum of
messianism serves as an alibi. Whence the strange adjective "weak". I
am not sure I would define the messianicity I speak of as power (it
is, no less, a vulnerability or a kind of absolute powerlessness); but
even if I did define it as power, as the movement of desire, as the
attraction, invincible elan or affirmation of an unpredictable
future-to-come (or even as the past to come again), the experience of
the non-present, of the non-living present in the living present (of
the spectral . . . . I would never say, in speaking of this "power",
that it is strong or weak . . . . For in my view, the universal,
quasi-transcendental structure that I call messianicity without
messianism is not bound up with any particular moment of (political or
general) history or culture (Abrahamic or any other); and it does not
serve any sort of messianism as an alibi, does not mime or reiterate
any sort of messianism, does not confirm or undermine any sort of
messianism.78

     48. Yet Benjamin's messianism was not an alibi in the sense that
Derrida means it -- as a capitulation to the specter of (Abrahamic or
Marxist or both) determinism. Quite the opposite. Benjamin's own
messianism fell short of Marx's sense of "vocation", or "destiny" of
the communist individual for whom self-determination is a collective
social act.79 Benjamin rejected the party as playing into the hands of
bourgeois culture, while he sought to explode the contradictions from
inside bourgeois culture.80 He was a dedicated communist committed to
class struggle as the means of transcending the reified bourgeois
subject. There is nothing in Benjamin's role as communist intellectual
to suggest any "messianic power", however weak. He did not act as a
Stirnerian ego deluded about his "freedom". This would have reproduced
in Benjamin the melancholy he found in all theological (spirit-ridden)
transcendence, as against the materialist transcendence which occurs
when knowledge of the "fully concrete" (i.e. void filled in) and
mediated "moment" destroys bourgeois culture and its economic
underpinnings.81

     49. The manner of Benjamin's death raises important questions
that cannot be answered here about the role of the detached communist
intellectual compared to the party cadre.82 Derrida implies in
Benjamin's rejection of the "Communist Party" a tendency towards a
"hauntology" of the ghosts of determinism making his rebellion
possible. Benjamin's suicide may have had the appearance of an
authentic undetermined act. But it was the "overdetermined" action of
physically isolated, power-less and "defeated" communist individual.83
Derrida identifies only with a surface resonance of Benjamin's
"rebellion" and misses the historical and material conditions that
determined his life and death. Derrida would have been a mortal enemy
in Benjamin's project to rid the world of capitalism and its reified
(alienated) subjects.

     50. Nevertheless, in flirting with Benjamin, Derrida is trying to
re-appropriate a "spirit" of Marxism, which is much more than David
Harvey claims:

         Derrida's resort to something akin to the Leibnezian conceit
in his discussion of self-other relations as he examines how the
"European subject" (an entity that Leibniz was also crucially
concerned with) constitutes itself on the inside through the
construction of the "other" -- the colonial subject. Spivak (1988:294)
approvingly cites Derrida's strategy as follows: "To render thought or
the thinking subject transparent or invisible seems to hide the
relentless recognition of the Other by assimilation. It is in the
interest of such cautions that Derrida does not invoke 'letting the
other(s) speak for himself' but rather invokes an 'appeal' to, or
'call' to the 'quite-other' . . . of 'rendering delirious that
interior voice that is the voice of the other in us'. The dangers of
such a gesture are obvious. If the only way in which the 'other' can
be represented is through 'rendering delirious' the voices that I have
internalised in the process of discovering myself, then very soon the
identities of 'l'autre c'est moi' become as surely planted as did the
thesis of 'l'estate c'est moi'".84

     51. This passage echoes Marx's critique of Stirner forcing the
"other" into his "Procrustean bed". But the point is surely that, for
Marx, Leibniz's philosophy had already been transcended by Hegel who
had overcome the false Kantian dualism and united objective and
subjective realities. The young Hegelians then turned Hegel "right
side up" but retained the mystical kernel in the ahistorical
abstraction of humanity. So it is not Leibniz who becomes the
reference point for Derrida, but rather Stirner who took the ideal of
humanity to the extreme of the "unique" individual. His subjective
idealism rejected all social norms and conventions as limits on the
free ego. For Derrida this represents the lost "spirit" of the early
Marx who made the mistake of not rejecting his own "haunting", i.e.
his own self "reduced" to social relations of production. Derrida is
not interested in the Leibniz pre-capitalist monad, but the
young-Hegelian "self" which Marx "denied". It is Derrida's insistence
that Marx "denied" his true spirit, which Derrida wants to conjure up
and restore to life that gives Derrida's intervention its political point.

     52. I want to suggest that Derrida's intervention in Specters is
not a frontal attack on Western Marxism a la post-modernism in general
as Harvey would suggest. Post-modernism rejects the Enlightenment
frame in which Marxism is also caught. Derrida accepts that the
"humanist" project is what is at stake. He does not turn his back on
the Enlightenment, but picks up on its critique of Hegel's objective
idealism by the Young Hegelians. He wants to restore the "humanist
project" to the free will of the undetermined ego by denying the
alienated bourgeois subject with its roots in the ontology of labour.

     53. Derrida locates the 'free spirit' of Marx in Stirners'
defence of private property, in civil society as an "association of
egoists", and in Stirner's rejection of revolutionary violence as a
totalitarian threat to individual freedom.85 He also hopes to enlist
Benjamin in his reconstruction project. However, as I have argued,
there is nothing in Benjamin that allows him to be reduced to the
idealist "autonomous ego". Moreover, his "idealist residue" is a
powerful stimulus to the rebuilding of a dialectical Marxism, against
Derrida's deconstruction project.86 Thus Stirner's anarchist idealism
is a much more suitable go-between than Benjamin's "weak messianic
power" in the marriage of Marxism and deconstruction.

     54. So far his critics can go. Beyond this point, Derrida wants
to dehistoricise the origins of Marxism via deconstruction as a
contemporary "indirect apologetics" for capitalism. His is a
pre-emptive strike to render Western Marxism even more harmless than
it is, and provide an antidote to any revival of revolutionary
Marxism. Those critics who are part of Western Marxism, and whose
method reflects the idealist split between objective and subjective
reality, leave the proletariat exposed to Derrida's political purpose.
Their critiques remain one-sided critiques of ideology unless they are
capable of uniting the theory and practice in a revolutionary party.87

     55. It is striking that in his reply to his critics in "Marx and
Sons" Derrida makes use of the failure of his Marxist critics to
demolish his surreptitious religion. By this I mean Derrida's
celebration of alienation as performativity, and of deconstruction as
"emptying the void" (i.e. ghost worship). He turns on his critics,
accusing them (Spivak, Eagleton and Ahmad) of defending "Marx the
father's property" as their inheritance.88 "To whom is Marxism
supposed to belong?" he asks. This is the sort of question that can
only be asked by one intellectual of another. No doubt Derrida's
answer is that Marxism belongs to those who can "transform" Marxism
according to the "spirit" of Marx. His criticism is that the
"proprietal Marxists" should leave the patriarchal household. My
answer is: Marxism does not "belong" to anyone, but it is the
"ineffaceable mark" of the proletariat for which it is the promissory
note of an historic emancipation. To prove that this is not some rival
messianism with Marx as the patriarch, it will be necessary to return
to the Marx's method in the German Ideology and to the work of Lukacs
and Lenin to counter Derrida's misappropriation of Marx.

Indirect Apologetics

     56. If it is true that Derrida's "turn to Marx" is to subvert a
genuine Marxism, how must he try to do this? In a word he has to
render alienation natural (i.e. universal, ahistorical, nothingness).
Because alienation is the fundamental condition of living labour
dominated by dead labour under capitalist social relations, real-world
Marxism seeks to end alienation through revolutionary practice.
Derrida must abstract from capitalist social relations and naturalise
the ego as an historically indeterminate actor capable of realising
its "self" through its authentic pure actions. To do so he has to
engage in some idealist ghost-busting. The real "specter" of alienated
labour separates society from nature. This is expressed as a split
between labour and its value, between labour-power as use-value and
exchange-value. Thus Derrida must reject the "ghosts" of "labour",
"value" and "class".

     57. By rejecting the ontology of living labour as the source of
determinate social life Derrida removes at one stroke any objective
being as presence. Next the capital-labour relation is obliterated as
"metaphysics". The historical unity of production and consumption is
broken, and restored only in an alienated ie. supernatural or idealist
form, as the irreducible, pre-social act. This break in the unity of
production and consumption can take many forms, deceptively different.
In one sense the whole of Western Marxism can be understood as the
result of "freezing" the moments in this unity.89 But there is common
metaphysic -- that of the alienated labouring social self. The subject
is dominated in thought by an alien absence (the determinate "other"
of dead labour) which is impossible to recover -- as fetishised
labour, love, or power -- except in an alienated form.

     58. In response to his critics Derrida's attempt to claim
adherence to the notion of class is pathetic. "I believe that an
interest in what the concept of class struggle aimed at, an interest
in analysing conflicts in social forces, is still absolutely
indispensable...But I'm not sure that the concept of class, as its
been inherited is the best instrument for those activities, unless it
is considerably differentiated".90 This is a banal Weberian, social
democratic, liberal "Third way" even, lipservice to class shorn of
"inheritance", i.e. social relations, contradictions, etc.

     59. But Derrida is not free indulge in mysticism as a purely
ideological exercise or publicity stunt. He senses that Marxism is not
quite "post". The contradictions of capitalism manifest themselves in
mounting political, social and cultural crises. In its attempts to
overcome the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, the
market tries to commodify everything, including its own ideological
legitimation, thereby transposing the crisis directly from the
infrastructure to the superstructure with less and less mediation. As
the crisis invades the "lifeworld", i.e. culture, the ideological
expressions become more and more extreme -- e.g. hyperreality --
echoing Marx's prophetic words about "idealising phrases, conscious
illusion, deliberate hypocrisy".91

     60. This is not just any old anarchy. The impending crisis
appears to Derrida as the return of Marx's ghost. Derrida re-reads the
Communist Manifesto and realises he has to lay the ghost.92 The
specter of communism is still haunting the world. The specter must be
conjured away.93 The academic factory scavenges the corpus of Marx
after the death of "defacto Marxism". To certify the death. "Marx is
dead, communism is dead, very dead, and along with it its hopes, its
discourse, its theories, and its practices. It says: long live
capitalism, long live the market, here's to the survival of economic
and political liberalism!"94 The incantations are necessary to keep
the 10 plagues of the new world disorder at bay.95 But they will not
work because they cannot identify the ghost. The real ghost has to be
faced and a "new international" or "association of egos" created to
conjure away the ghost.

     61. Consider Derrida's interesting excursion on the academic
neutralisation (cushioning operation) of Marx.

         Why insist on imminence, on urgency and injunction, on all
that which in them does not wait? In order to try to remove what we
are going to say from what risks happening, if we judge by the many
signs, to Marx's work today, which is to say also to his injunction.
What risks happening is that one will try to play Marx off against
Marxism so as to neutralise, or at any rate muffle the political
imperative in the untroubled exegesis of a classified work. One can
sense a coming fashion or stylishness in this regard in the culture
and more precisely in the university. And what is there to worry about
here? Why fear what may also become a cushioning operation? This
recent stereotype would be destined, whether one wishes it or not, to
depoliticise profoundly the Marxist reference, to do its best, by
putting on a tolerant face, to neutralise a potential force, first of
all by enervating a corpus, by silencing in it the revolt [the return
is acceptable provided that the revolt, which initially inspired
uprising, indignation, insurrection, revolutionary momentum, does not
come back]. People would be ready to accept the return of Marx or the
return to Marx, on the condition that a silence is maintained about
Marx's injunction not just to decipher but to act and to make the
deciphering [the interpretation] into a transformation that "changes
the world". In the name of an old concept of reading, such an ongoing
neutralisation would attempt to conjure away danger: now that Marx is
dead, and especially now that Marxism seems to be in rapid
decomposition, some people seem to say, we are going to be able to
concern ourselves with Marx without being bothered -- by the Marxists
and, why not, by Marx himself, that is, by a ghost that goes on
speaking. We'll treat him calmly, objectively, without bias: according
to the academic rules, in the University, in the library, in
colloquia! We'll do it systematically, by respecting the norms of
hermeneutical, philological, philosophical exegesis. If one listens
closely, one already hears whispered: "Marx, you see, was despite
everything a philosopher like any other; what is more [and one can say
this now that so many Marxists have fallen silent], he was a great
philosopher who deserves to figure on the list of those works we
assign for study and from which he has been banned for too long. He
doesn't belong to the communists, to the Marxists, to the parties; he
ought to figure within our great canon of Western political
philosophy. Return to Marx, let's finally read him as a great
philosopher." We have heard this and we will hear it again.

         It is something altogether other that I wish to attempt here
as I turn or return to Marx. It is "something other" to the point that
I will have occasion instead, and this will not be only for lack of
time and space, to insist even more on what commands us today, without
delay, to do everything we can so as to avoid the neutralising
anaesthesia of a new theoreticism, and to prevent a
philosophico-philological return to Marx from prevailing. Let us spell
things out, let us insist: to do everything we can so that it does not
prevail, but not to avoid its taking place, because it remains just as
necessary. This will cause me, for the moment to give priority to the
political gesture I am making here, at the opening of a colloquium,
and to leave more or less in the state of a program and of schematic
indications the work of philosophical exegesis, and all the
"scholarship" that this "position-taking" today, still requires.96

     62. Derrida doesn't want to leave Marx as merely an academic
commodity. He knows that is no way to bu(r)y Marx (how many
proletarian militants will pass through the academies of the new
millennium?). Rather he wants to embrace a re-born Marx as a mass
commodity. He wants to honour one spirit out of a number of Marx's
spirits for deconstruction. It is the spirit of rebellion, of the
moral injunction, of individuals to aspire to the pure act of
salvation. Derrida sees that capitalism cannot be contained inside
discourse. Capitalism's contradictions cannot be ignored, so its
apologetics have to be indirect. He needs transcendental signifiers
for mass ecological destruction, genocide, poverty, disease etc. So
Derrida buys Marx cheap, i.e. after his death and burial.97 He then
excavates only the spirit he wants. He "disappears" those spirits he
doesn't want -- the totalising method, the "dogmatics", the party, the
old-fashioned workers international. Then sells Marx dear as a
emancipatory/religious icon by diminishing Marxism to a utopian
anarcho/socialism, and then packaging it as the "promised land".
Derrida's reduction of the "spirit of Marx" to a "messianic
eschatology" and the "spirit of Marxist critique" is repacked as the
commodity of "radical deconstruction".98 This becomes clear in the
section written in response to the cynics who justifiably ask, "You
picked a good time to Salute Marx".

         Which Marxist Spirit, then? It is easy to imagine why we will
not please the Marxists, and still less all the others, by insisting
in this way on the spirit of Marxism, especially if we let it be
understood that we intend to understand spirits in the plural and in
the sense of specters, of untimely specters that one must not chase
away but sort out, critique, keep close by, and allow to come back.
And of course, we must never hide from the fact that the principle of
selectivity which will have to guide and hierarchise among the
"spirits" will fatally exclude in its turn. It will even annihilate,
by watching (over) its ancestors rather than (over) certain others. . .

         . . . To continue to take inspiration from Marxism would be
to keep faith with what has always made of Marxism in principle and
first of all a radical critique, namely a procedure ready to undertake
self-critique. This critique wants itself to be in principle and
explicitly open to its own transformation, re-evaluation,
self-reinterpretation. Such a critical "wanting-itself" necessarily
takes root, it is involved in a ground that is not yet critical, even
if it is not, not yet, pre-critical. This latter spirit is more than a
style, even though it is also a style. It is the heir to a spirit of
the Enlightenment, which must not be renounced. We would distinguish
this spirit from other spirits of Marxism, those that rivet it to the
body of Marxist doctrine, to its supposed systemic, metaphysical, or
ontological totality (notably to its "dialectical method" or to
"dialectical materialism"), to its fundamental concepts of labor, mode
of production, social class, and consequently to the whole history of
its apparatuses (projected or real: the Internationals of the labour
movement, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the single party, the
State, and finally the totalitarian monstrosity). . . .99

     63. That spirit of Marxism that is radical and able to critique
itself, is the spirit that Derrida wants to recover and use today as a
radical deconstruction of the other "spirits of "Marxism" that are not
radical in this sense. To be radical thus means a constant re-styling
of the commodity-Marxism. The "fundamental concepts" of labour (and
labour value?) must go. No doubt they are spirits that have too much
proletarian resonance today in the world of "plagues". Mode of
production is too metaphysical. It betrays the "spirit" of
"dialectical method".100 Social class and the state as an instrument
of class rule? How can a class rule?! No! says the radical apologist
of plague-ridden capitalism -- no class can rule because class is a
ghost, which cohabits with other ghosts such as labour and value. Such
"spirits" must be "fatally excluded".

         To critique, to call for interminable self-critique is still
to distinguish between everything or almost everything. Now there is a
spirit of Marxism, which I will never be ready to renounce, it is not
only a critical idea or the questioning stance (a consistent
deconstruction must insist on them even as it also learns that this is
not the last or first word). It is even more a certain emancipatory
and messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise that
one can try to liberate from any dogmatics and even from any
metaphysico-religious determination, from any messianism. . . .

     64. But more than self-criticism (i.e. deconstruction) is the
"emancipatory" promise to liberate one from these ghosts of
"determinism", from a "messianic affirmation" that one can be saved by
knowledge and rational action. Instead there is nothing but
"interminable self-critique" and an irrational messianicity of
individual salvation. Here, Derrida expresses his debt to the earlier
philosophers of self-emancipation from Nietzsche to Heidegger.101 The
problem now however, is to reclaim Marx, the most damning critic of
irrationalism and of its most bizarre disciple Stirner, as an indirect
apologist for irrationalism.

         . . . Now, this gesture of fidelity to a certain spirit of
Marxism is a responsibility incumbent in principle, to be sure, on
anyone. Barely deserving the name community, the new International
belongs only to anonymity. But this responsibility appears today, at
least within the limits of an intellectual and academic field, to
return more imperatively and, let us say so as not to exclude anyone,
by priority, in urgency to those who, during the last decades, managed
to resist a certain hegemony of the Marxist dogma, indeed of its
metaphysics, in its political or theoretical forms. And still more
particularly to those who have insisted on conceiving and on
practicing this resistance without showing any leniency towards
reactionary, conservative, or neo-conservative, anti-scientific or
obscurantist temptations, to those who, on the contrary have
ceaselessly proceeded in a hyper-critical fashion, I will dare to say
in a deconstructive fashion, in the name of a new Enlightenment for
the century to come. And without renouncing an ideal of democracy and
emancipation, but rather by trying to think it and to put it to work
otherwise. . . .102

     65. Derrida thinks his own political credentials for "putting to
work" the "ideal of democracy and emancipation", in a "deconstructive
fashion" are good. He claims that the "end of communist Marxism did
not await the recent collapse of the USSR . . . all that started at
the beginning of the '50s . . . the eschatological themes of the 'end
of history', of the 'end of Marxism', of the 'end of philosophy', of
the 'ends of man', of the 'last man' and so forth were, in the '50's,
that is forty years ago, our daily bread". Deconstruction, he says,
was born out of this "totalitarian terror" of Stalinism and
neo-Stalinism. So deconstruction of the totalising "philosophical
responses" includes Marxism in the name of "differance". "The
originary performativity that does not conform to pre-existing
conventions . . . In the incoercible differance the here-now unfurls.
No differance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no
singularity without the here-now".103

     66. Here Derrida is reproducing the core of Stirner's "unique",
the "freedom" to act in the absence of coercive, totalising, social
relations. Derrida does not see that the individual uncoerced act is
not "against" totalitarianism. Rather it is the expression of the
"unfreedom" of the alienated bourgeois subject. It is the ghost in the
mirror, the ghost on the rampart, the absence separated from presence.
Deconstructed, performativity is the "practice" of the alienated
capitalist individual. It is "rebellion" as "sentimentality and
bragging". Here we have the "cushioning exercise" which poses the
rebel spirit of Marx as his true spirit, to render the socially
determinate as the irreducible "here-now". He "sells" the revolution
in the name of the rebellion of the "association of egoists".104

     67. Marx anticipates Derrida's "here/now" performativity in his
critique of Stirner's "unique":

         Individuals have always and in all circumstances "proceeded
from themselves", but since they were not unique in the sense of not
needing any connections with one another, and since their needs,
consequently their nature, and the method of satisfying their needs,
connected them with one another (relations between the sexes, exchange
division of labour), they had to enter into relations with one
another. Moreover, since they entered into intercourse with one
another not as pure egos, but as individuals at a definite stage of
development of their productive forces and requirements, and since
this intercourse, in its turn, determined production and needs, it was
therefore, precisely the personal, individual behaviour of
individuals, their behaviour to one another as individuals, that
created the existing relations and daily reproduces them anew.105

The New International

     68. What is the meaning of Derrida's "new International" as his
answer to globalisation and its 10 plagues? Derrida invokes, as a
counter-conjuration, a worldwide social movement with no organising
features to reform international law! As an idealist fix, this is no
more than a hollow call for social justice which joins with Soros and
Giddens et al. in appeals to a spontaneous "millenarian" power of
bourgeois citizens to fight "responsibly" for a democratic capitalism
against the totalitarian spectres of speculative capital,
fundamentalist ideas and totalising dogma.

         But without necessarily subscribing to the whole Marxist
discourse (which moreover, is complex, evolving, heterogeneous) on the
State and its appropriation by a dominant class, on the distinction
between State power and State apparatus, on the end of the political,
on "the end of politics", or on the withering away of the State, and,
on the other hand without suspecting the juridical ideas in itself,
one may still find inspiration in the Marxist "spirit" to criticise
the presumed autonomy of the juridical and to denounce endlessly the
de facto take-over of international authorities by powerful
National-states, by concentrations of techno-scientific capital,
symbolic capital, and financial capital, of State capital and private
capital. A "new international" is being sought through these crises of
international law; it already denounces the limits of a discourse on
human rights that will remain inadequate, sometimes hypocritical, and
in any case formalistic and inconsistent with itself as long as the
law of the market, the "foreign debt", the inequality of
techno-scientific, military, and economic development maintain an
effective inequality as monstrous as that which prevails today, to a
greater extent than ever in the history of humanity. For it must be
cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in
the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised
itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality,
exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human
beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing
the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist
market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating
the "end of ideologies" and the end of the great emancipatory
discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made
up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress
allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never
have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or
exterminated on the earth. . . .

     69. The concerns of the "new International" are those of liberal
democracy -- poverty, ecological destruction, crimes against humanity
-- and so on -- which are caused by the "de facto takeover of
international authorities" by nation states and capital. Thus the
authority of the law which is being 'taken over' is that which
represents bourgeois right as freedom and equality ie. bourgeois
citizenship rights and civil society. While Soros can talk of the
aberration of finance capital, and Giddens of fundamentalism against
citizenship, Derrida provides the political philosophy of the
hyper-decadent bourgeois ego. Like Stirner in his day Derrida conjures
up a philosophical apology for private property and the "freedom of
labour". And as with any common liberal it seems that Derrida
subscribes to such norms and conventions of bourgeois society when he
defends them against the challenge of "crimes" and "oppression" of
capital. However, in rejecting the method and theory of Marxism as
"totalitarian", and wishing to renew Marxism as a "weak messianic
power", Derrida is advocating a "new" reformist International that
subscribes to an ideology of distributional social justice posing as
"natural" justice. Since this is the way the fetishised social
relations of capital appear in daily life, there is no necessity for a
"new International" which is organised around a revolutionary programme.

         . . . The "New International" is not only that which is
seeking a new international law through these crimes. It is a link of
affinity, suffering, and hope, a still discreet, almost secret link,
as it was around 1848, but more and more visible, we have more than
one sign of it. It is an untimely link, without status, without title,
and without name, barely public even if it is not clandestine, without
contract, "out of joint", without coordination, without party, without
country, without national community (International before, across, and
beyond any national determination), without co-citizenship, without
common belonging to a class. The name of the new International is
given here to what calls to the friendship of an alliance without
institution among those who, even if they no longer believe or never
believed in the socialist-Marxist International, in the dictatorship
of the proletariat, in the messiano-eschatological role of the
universal union of the spirits of Marx or Marxism (they now know that
there is more than one) and in order to ally themselves, in a new,
concrete, and real way, even if this alliance no longer takes the form
of a party or a workers' international, but rather of a kind of
counter-conjuration, in the (theoretical and practical) critique of
the state of international law, the concepts of State and nation, and
so forth: in order to renew this critique, and especially to
radicalise it.106

     70. Derrida's new International is nothing like a Marxist
international and more like a Masonic order.107 By basing itself on
the ideal to which capitalism aspires in its fetishised form of equal
exchange, he seeks to render this ideal real for each individual. The
spirit of Marx he has recovered is actually that of Stirner's "free
ego" who is alienated not by society-in-general, but by capitalist
social relations. To express this freedom as a intellectual critique
or a "radicalisation" of Marxism is a retreat to a subjective idealism
in which the bourgeois subject aspiring to Stirner's "unique" remains
trapped in performativity as consumption of its alienated identity.

     71. So in his misappropriation of Marx, Derrida offers the young
idealists of today a brand of anarchism they can consume in the belief
that their actions constitute a rebellion for "democracy" and
"emancipation" against the dehumanising norms and conventions that
alienate them. Just as Stirner's "association of egoists" was a
figment of his "Thought", Derrida's new International has the
potential to divert a new generation of alienated youth into
discursive acts against the symptomatic phrases rather than the
materialist substance of capitalist crisis.

     72. In his response to his critics who deride the idea of an
"international" without class he replies:

         Whenever I speak of the New International in Specters of
Marx, emphasising that, in it, solidarity or alliance should not
depend, fundamentally and in the final analysis, on class affiliation,
this in no wise signifies, for me, the disappearance of "classes" or
the attenuation of conflicts connected with "class" differences or
oppositions (or, at least, differences or oppositions based on the new
configurations of social forces for which I do in fact believe that we
need new concepts and therefore, perhaps new names as well) . . . the
disappearance of power relations, or relations of social domination .
. . . At issue is, simply, another dimension of analysis and political
commitment, one that cuts across social differences and oppositions of
social forces (what one used to call, simplifying, "classes"). I would
not say that such a dimension (for instance, the dimension of social,
national, or international classes, or political struggles within
nation states, problems of citizenship or nationality, or party
strategies, etc.) is superior or inferior, a primary or a secondary
concern, fundamental or not. All that depends, at every instant, on
new assessments of what is urgent in, first and foremost, singular
situations and of their structural implications. For such an
assessment, there is, by definition, no pre-existing criterion or
absolute calculability; analysis must begin anew every day everywhere,
without ever being guaranteed by prior knowledge. It is on this
condition, on the condition constituted by this injunction, that there
is, if there is, action, decision and political responsibility --
repoliticization.108

     73. In other words, the term "international" is a mystique. It
covers for a nihilistic cult. Its Marxist meaning is inverted; just as
messianicity is messianism without a given messiah -- because everyone
is one's own messiah. There is no prior knowledge that can guide any
collective action because that pre-anything (society, religion, etc.)
is spectral, is the unfilled "void". There are only irreducible acts
which individuals perform at any given moment by personally attempting
to calculate, on the spot as it were, which of many "dimensions" or
"forces" immediately concern them, "responsibly" and in the name of
"justice" (whose gift?). If there is one name to apply to this
contingent conjunction of "forces" which tries to "name" the "new" it
is as I have argued above, performativity.109 Moreover, as I set out
to prove, Derrida's performativity is the idealist philosophical
license for the political/social concept of reflexivity as developed
by Soros and Giddens to express their abstract understanding of the
'structure-agency' problem in the new global economy.110 Teamed-up, as
performo-reflexivity, we could not get a better prescription for
"demobilising" and "depoliticising" the masses in the face of the
current world crisis of capitalism.

Marxist Dialectics

     74. Yet as the crisis of "very late" capitalism looms larger it
cannot be contained by such idealist fixes.111 Despite the hype,
capitalism that is in dis-order and dis-equilibrium, and in terror of
its own ghosts (this time the real ghosts of dead labour) is under
threat of a materialist re-haunting. The victory of the more market
messianicity is clamped in the jaws of contradiction. The neo-Hegelian
infinite liberal democracy cannot paper over the cracks in the world
economy. The resident contradiction between use-value and
exchange-value asserts itself constantly in the form of the rejection
of Says law that supply creates demand -- that the market is the
best/only historic mechanism to meet the needs of consumers. Needs are
"out of joint" with profits. There is no "jointure" if consumers have
no income with which to consume to meet their needs/justice. What pure
gifts are possible when poverty cannot be commodified? So how can the
Soros/Derrida/Giddens "new International" of the "new, new right" be
the answer to underconsumption?

     75. Underconsumption was the problem that Keynes recognised as
the result of insufficient investment. There was no necessary
connection between demand and supply because capitalists were governed
by "animal spirits" which determined whether or not they would invest
in production to supply demand. Keynes solution was for the state to
take responsibility for productive investment [consumption] when the
capitalists did not. What Keynes failed to recognise was that
capitalists' motivation for investment did not depend upon their
atavistic ahistorical "animal spirits", but the rate of profit.112

     76. Keynes was unable to explain why Say's law broke down.
Capitalists only produce to meet demand if they can make a profit.
This is not a problem of under-consumption that can be fixed by
boosting consumption, but a problem of overproduction of capital that
cannot be reinvested profitably. The reason for this is that consumer
needs are not sovereign under capitalism, profits are. In order to
produce capitalists want to make profits and they can only do this if
they can expropriate sufficient surplus-value during production to be
realised as profits. They will not permit their profits as private
property to be socialised by fiat or by stealth. And while this is the
case the messianic Hayek and Co can still argue for the inherent
superiority of the market. Bourgeois social relations and their legal
forms, property rights, set systemic limits to the possibility of
distributional/cultural/legal reforms.

     77. Hence modern capitalist society is 'reflexive' only to the
point where it generates a spontaneous defensive reflex from the
owners of the 'structure' of private property against the 'agency' of
the rampant oppressed. Giddens' attempts to supplant "productivism"
with a "post-scarcity order" will also come up against this limit.113
Given the need to accumulate capital, capitalists have to constantly
increase the rate of exploitation (expropriation of relative
surplus-value) and to do this they are driven to increase their
investment in constant capital (machines etc) to increase labour
productivity. This is what Marx called relative surplus value
expropriation. This has the effect of super-exploiting a relatively
declining proportion of workers, and throwing an ever-larger number of
workers onto the industrial scrap-heap. As a result capitalism
produces more and more efficiently with less and less necessary labour
time in order to increase relative surplus value.

     78. This creates an obvious problem. Profits begin to fall if the
rate of surplus value does not rise fast enough to keep up with the
rising organic composition (the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to
Fall -- TRPF -- which Marx called the most important law of political
economy). This is the real cause of capitalist instability and
disequilibrium. But in addition to this, and with fatal consequences
for Say's law, proportionately less value is expended on variable
capital (wages) and is available for wage-good consumption. So
capitalism digs its own grave by creating a working class that becomes
increasingly impoverished and unable to consume what it needs without
revolutionising the relations of production.114

     79. The market therefore cannot be fixed by state intervention to
compensate for this falling demand because it cannot prevent the
fundamental cause of overproduction in the first place. Keynesian
demand management, which involves boosting state spending and working
class consumption, exacerbates the problem of falling profits because
taxes are a drain on profits! The fatal flaw of the market, (and of
all forms of market socialism that are all attempts at state
intervention to suppress the TRPF) is that it is integrated into the
circuit of capital at the point of exchange. It cannot be cut loose
and doctored to transform the circuit of capital, since in the last
analysis the circuit of capital is determined by production and
production relations.115

     80. What does this mean for the ideology of more-market as the
"historic best" at matching supply with demand? It makes all the
rhetoric surrounding the superiority of the market over planning so
much hot air. Hayek's fundamental point that only the market can
coordinate the information necessary to match supply with demand falls
flat when demand falls flat.116 The demand factor is now seen to be
not the result of a natural market-freedom to spend a "factor" income.
Rather demand results from a socially alienated and historically
conditioned residual income, the value of the wage, in the case of the
vast majority of producers, or revenue plus profit as expropriated
value in the case of the tiny minority or exploiters. But consumption
depends upon production. The production of market mythology will
continue, but its consumption will fall as demand collapses. As the
masses are starved of consumption, the ghosts of alienated labour and
the fetishised world-view will cease to hold them in thrall. It will
no longer be possible for indirect apologetics of Derrida and Co. to
keep up the lie of the (l)awful legitimacy of the market.

     81. In the face of the contemporary crisis of capitalist
production it becomes more difficult to maintain the false split in
reality between ideal fixes and material roots. The symptoms collapse
in on the cause. The discourse is exposed as dis-cause. Crisis theory
formerly retracted into discourse without even the signifiers of the
contradiction -- use-value/exchange-value -- explodes back into
consciousness. And despite all his efforts to de-materialise Marx into
the idealist Max Stirner, Derrida cannot suppress this fundamental
contradiction of signified dead labour carried on the backs of living
labour coming back to haunt him.

     82. In other words there is more to "life" outside discourse than
the "void". And there is more to this "void" than fetishised
appearances (including Derrida's "speeches" to the masses).117
Derrida's recuperation of Marx stops at exchange relations. The 10
plagues are but manifestations of capitalist ills that can be
Stirnerised without totalising transformations. But the real predicate
that Stirner fears -- the ghostly contradiction between use-value and
exchange-value -- is in reality objective. It manifests itself both
objectively and subjectively as a dialectical process that cannot be
suppressed by idealist contemplation/interpretation. And despite their
wilful attempts to reject history as dialectics, and to substitute the
unique ego, both Stirner and Derrida have a place in the division of
labour already set aside for them. It is as bourgeois intellectuals
engaged in indirect apologetics of pre/post-Marxism.118

     83. This proves, as Trotsky said, that if we don't "recognise"
dialectics, dialectics nevertheless "recognises" us: "that is, extends
its sway" over us.119 In the same way that the "visor effect" blocks
off the ghost's identity yet the ghost sees right through us.120 So in
the end, it is dialectics -- finally the contradiction between
use-value and exchange value -- that is the ghost that haunts
capitalism. No amount of tinkering with the system will stop the
capitalist market as a historically time bound mechanism from collapse
(though if the proletariat pushes it will not fall in on them). The
market and the new millenarian hype cannot magic away the "specter" of
Marxism. It cannot be conjured out of existence. The Dialectic is the
ghost's re-visit. The Spectre of Marx re-materialises Derrida's
hauntology.

Millenerianism or Materialism?

     84. Today, after more than 200 years of capitalist expansion all
over the world, we face the dawn of another century. Will it herald a
conflict free age of social advancement, or an age of growing social
disorder and international class conflict? By itself a new century
offers no hope to the billions of workers and peasants whose lives are
ruined or destroyed by the ruthless capitalist market. It will only
offer hope, if they can shed all their religious and superstitious
illusions about the past and the future, and destroy the social system
that denies them hope in this life. The promise of the new millennium
for the masses is not the re-born Marx of Derrida, but the dialectical
method of the German Ideology and of Lukacs, Lenin and Trotsky. Only
such a real-world Marxism shows them how to root out the causes of
their poverty and misery and to overcome their alienation from
themselves and others and to take the power over production and
society in the name of humanity.

     85. I think that Marx was already a materialist dialectician in
the German Ideology.121 Not in spite of, but because of Hegel. This
shows up clearly in his critique of Stirner. The contradiction of the
relations and forces of production was already at the centre of Marx's
method. Unfortunately Western Marxism aping radical bourgeois ideology
split and fetishised the forces or the relations into a one-sided
fatalism or voluntarism. This is the trap of Western Marxism laid by
the petty bourgeois intellectuals with no life in the class struggle
but who want to (p)reserve an indeterminate cultural space for their
own historical "com-edification". Benjamin was a victim of this
failure of dialectics, but no more than the various "communist"
internationals that failed to apply materialist dialectics and thus
the method of Bolshevism. Within this tradition only Lukacs powerful
analysis of bourgeois irrationalism (that splits subject and object)
succeeds in uniting theory and practice in the party.122

     86. Lenin and Trotsky revived the dialectical method in the form
of the revolutionary party. The contradictory unity of objective and
subjective reality was realised in the revolutionary programme by
means of revolutionary practice. Here we find bourgeois idealism
subjected to the revolutionary critique of practice. The weapon of
critique becomes the critique of weapons. Freedom is not posed as the
fear of necessity expressed as "metaphysics" only to be 'overcome' by
the authentic irrational acts of isolated individuals. Real freedom is
the recognition of necessity. First, as the theory of the historic
social relations which determine social life and which alienate
bourgeois subjects from their labour and from themselves. Second, as
the practice that allows necessity to be transcended by social
revolution.123

     87. We do not have to let capitalism destroy the planet. We can
take power, expropriate the expropriators, and collectively plan to
create a better, freer, and equal society called socialism. But to do
this we need to mobilise and organise the working class. Not in
Derrida's "spirit of Marxism" but against it, taking stock of Marx's
method, recuperating the methods of the Bolsheviks and taking state
power. This is both necessary and possible, since the contradictions
of capitalism make busting the ghost of alienation and collectivising
dead labour the only means of survival as well as emancipation of
living labour.

--
Notes

1 Derrida, 1999, "Marx and Sons" in Sprinker (ed.) Ghostly
Demarcations. This is an astonishing appeal to the banished universals
of psychoanalysis as motivating his marxist critics.

2 Soros, 1998.

3 Most recently in Giddens, 1998.

4 New Statesman, October 31, 1997. See also the interview with Giddens
which talks about his influence on Blair's New Labour Party and his
search for a term which expresses the essence of the "global,
post-traditional, market society", in The New Yorker, October 6, 1997.

5 Giddens, 1995:1.

6 The role of bourgeois intellectuals as apologists for capitalism at
its various stages of development is tbe basic premise of Marx and
Engels in The German Ideology, and of Lukac's in The Destruction of
Reason. I develop this theme in this paper.

7 Despite his reputation to the contrary, Derrida is a philosopher
with his own "metavocabulary" (Rorty, 1991:94) and what's more
presents himself as the interpretor of a "real" world (Norris,
1997:106). The only question is: what is this reality? Here I argue
that it is the fetishised reality of exchange relations. Cf Spivak
(1995) on Derrida's confusion between "commercial" and "industrial"
capital. See Ahmad on Derrida's affinity with the "Third Way".

8 1994:63-64.

9 Ibid xix; 4.

10 Ibid 13.

11 Ibid 13. See Lewis on Derrida's 'metaphysical' and "psychological"
method of interpreting law, international law and nationalism.

12 For example in Sprinker (1999) both Negri and Hamacher argue for
qualitative transformations in capitalism which partially endorse
Derrida's project.

13 1994: 13.

14 I agree with Ahmad (1994) that Derrida's motives for reclaiming
Marx are suspect. Why didn't Derrida challenge the "dogmatics" with
his "spirit" of Marx when it could have mattered? Why mourn the death
of Marxism when he never loved it anyway? And why condemn totalitarian
Marxism and keep quiet about the right-wing uses of deconstruction?
But I argue that there is more to Derrida's "recouping" of Marx than a
re-branding of deconstruction to distinguish itself from the new right.

15 Op.cit. 13-14.

16 "In proposing this title, Specters of Marx, I was initially
thinking of all the forms of a certain haunting obsession that seems
to me to organise the dominant influence on discourse today. At a time
when the new world disorder is attempting to install its
neo-capitalism and neo-liberalism, no disavowal has managed to rid
itself of all of Marx's ghosts. Hegemony still organises the
repression and thus the confirmation of a haunting. Haunting belongs
to the structure of every hegemony". (37)

17 But this is only a symptom -- an "appearance" of "times out of
joint". Things need to be "put right" and made "lawful". But "dead
labour" (i.e., abstract labour that is embodied in the value of
commodities) cannot be made "lawful".

18 Why Derrida? His influence is wider than the academy, as a recent
visit to Australia and New Zealand showed, Derrida drew between 1000
and 2000 at public lectures and got exposure in the national media. It
seems that Derrida provides a "speculative philosophical"
anti-foundationism which is the necessary premise of "Third Way"
post-marxist and post-modernist politics. Anticipating this, Marx
argues that "speculative history" requires a shift from the mysticism
of the "concept" to the materialism of the person as
"self-consciousness", and to "thinkers", "philosophers" etc. who
represent the "concept" in history, the "ideologists who . . . are
understood as the manufacturers of history, as the "council of
guardians", as the rulers". ( Marx and Engels,1976:70)

19 I use "dead" labour in the sense of past "living labour" that
becomes "objectified labour", "crystallised" "congealed labour-time"
etc. (see Marx, 1976:129-131) now represented as "constant capital",
combined with current "living labour" or "variable capital" to set in
motion the further production of value (Marx, 1981:243-245).

20 Of course the performativity of alienated consumption appears as
the opposite, as the authentic realisation (sovereignty) of the
individual who is freed from necessary labour.

21 Marx, 1973:157. Also Marx, 1976:163-177. Money is the highest
expression of alienated labour. On the surface it seems that Derrida
understands this. However, on further inspection, the closest he comes
to it is to recognise that money is the alienated form of "property"
-- not specifically labour value.

22 Derrida is correct to see Fukuyama as presenting a Hegelian
"gospel", which echoes Kojeve, that the US and the EU is "the
embodiment of Hegel's state of universal recognition" (1994:61).

23 Ibid p. 62-65.

24 See Derrida' comments on use-value as ideology and ontology in
"Marx and Sons" (1999). By mystifying use-values, Derrida renders the
whole Hegelian/Marxism bag of tricks of dialectical contradiction
non-existent (haunted).

25 Lukacs defines "indirect apologetics": ". . . Whereas direct
apologetics was at pains to fudge the contradictions in the capitalist
system, to refute them with sophistry and to be rid of them, indirect
apologetics proceeded from these vary contradictions, acknowledging
their existence and their irrefutability as facts, while nonetheless
putting an interpretation on them which helped to confirm capitalism.
Wheras direct apologetics was at pains to depict capitalism as the
best of all orders, as the last, outstanding peak of mankind's
evolution, indirect apologetics crudely elaborated the bad sides, the
atrocities of capitalism, but explained them as attributes not of
capitalism but of all human existence and existence in general. From
this it necessarily follows that a struggle against these atrocities
not only appears doomed from the start but signifies and absurdity,
viz., a self-dissolution of the essentially human" (1980:202-3). Also:
"In the ethical realm, indirect apologetics chiefly discredited social
action in general, and in particular any tendency to want to change
society. . . . Indirect apologetics in ethics have the task of
steering intellectuals, sometimes rebellious ones, back to the path of
the bourgeoisie's reactionary development, while preserving all their
intellectual and moral pretentions to a superior ease in this respect
(1980:295).

26 The recent appearance of Sprinker's (1999) "symposium" on Derrida's
Specters of Marx, is disappointing. Of those contributors who are
clearly critical of Derrida, there is little that is new. Ahmad's
promise to devote a longer reply to Derrida has yet to appear. Lewis
reproduces much of Callincos' critique. Derrida's response is much
more interesting, including as it does Spivak (who does not appear in
Sprinker's book), in his petty and pathetic response in "Marx and Sons".

27 1995:37.

28 Eagleton, 1986:117.

29 1993:108.

30 Like Max Weber, when push comes to shove, Derrida is a vulgar
marginalist. On Weber see Lukacs, 1980, and Clarke, 1982.

31 1993:119.

32 Cf Ebert who accuses Spivak of "substituting discursive politics"
for the transformation of social relations, 1996:291-293.

33 Derrida, 1994:55. It is clear that Jameson approves of Derrida's
concept of the "messianic" as a realm of "contingency" for the
individual undetermined by social relations etc. I argue below that
this is a consequence of Jameson's adopting of Mandel's eclectic model
of Marxist economics which separates production from consumption, and
more recently Arrighi (1994) who over time separates speculative
capital from production. This primes Jameson to provide a "left cover"
for the post-Marxist "cultural turn" (1998).

34 1994:108-109.

35 1996: 40.

36 See Jameson, 1991: 3, 35, 53 and especially 400.

37 See Paul Mattick's (1981) critique of Late Capitalism. "Mandel
adheres to two distinct theories of crisis at once: the
overaccumulation theory, which is based on the relations of
production, and the overproduction theory, which is based on the
difficulties of realizing surplus value due to insufficient demand for
consumer goods" (200). That aspect of Mandel's theory which allows
increasing consumption to partially compensate for overproduction,
becomes the basis for his theory of the "Third Phase" of capitalist
development, or "Late Capitalism". Mandel's consumption theory of
crisis is that which is then used by Jameson to account for
post-modernity as the commodification of culture. It is a short step
from this theory to a messianic theory of cultural resistance as acts
of virtuality in the face of consumer choice.

38 By this I mean that Arrighi separates out the sphere of money
circulation (M-M') from production, not merely in a real time circuit,
M-C-M', where excess money capital which cannot invested profitably
results in speculation, but historically. Each hegemonic power goes
through a period of productive development followed by a period of
financial speculation. This is a retreat from Mandel's position which
conflates crises of overproduction and underconsumption where the
circuit of capital is potentially arrested at the consumption moment,
to a position in which financial speculation in the sphere of
circulation (M-M') creates a crisis that arrests the circuit of
capital. See Robert Polin's (1996) review of The Long Twentieth
Century. As Polin puts it, "Arrighi never explicitly poses the most
basic question about the M ­M ' circuit, which is, where do the
profits come from if not from the production and exchange of
commodities?" (115).

39 See Jameson "Culture and Finance Capital" in Jameson, 1998. Note
the echo of this "overaccumulation" of money theory of capitalist
crisis in Derrida"s "epidemic of overproduction", 1994:63.

40 1996:33.

41 1994:10.

42 I see Derrida as following in the tradition of irrationalist
philosophy of which Nietzsche and Heidegger are part. He is idealist
in rejecting an objective reality outside consciousness. His idealism
is subjective, as it is the individual consciousness rather than some
external transcendental consciousness that gives meaning to being. For
an excellent account of the role of Nietzsche and Heidegger as
"indirect apologists" for capitalism against socialism in the
irrationalist tradition, see Lukacs, 1980.

43 (1974: 25-28).

44 Derrida has no answer to the social causes of injustice. He argues
that "justice" must come not from vengeance as with Hamlet, not from
market exchange, but from pure gifts (presents) in a social "desert".
Here Derrida imagines that redistributive justice can proceed on the
basis of an absence of social content let alone social relations;
otherwise, he says, "justice risks being reduced again to
juridical-moral rules, norms, or representations, within an inevitable
totalizing horizon (movement of adequate restitution, expiation, or
reappropriation" (28). Cf Spivak, 1995: 77.

45 Ibid 28-29. To attribute to Marx such views is quite a feat. It is
the expression of a form of pious utopianism as we have seen. All the
more utopian as the moral injunction to give what one does not have is
not directed to those who can give some of what they have as charity.
Derrida's problem is that he cannot find a way to achieve justice in
the here/now for fear of "evil, expropriation, and injustice". But why
fear what already exists in the historic social relations of
capitalism? Because for Derrida the fear of the "inevitable totalising
horizon" of dogmatic Marxism is much greater than the actually
existing evil of capitalist expropriation and injustice. Marx did not
counterpose the future ideal of the communist individual as the answer
to capitalism today, but as the real outcome of the collective
knowledge, party organisation, and mateship of a revolutionary
alliance to expropriate and socialise the 'dead labour' of capitalist
property.

46 Lukacs, 1980:255.

47 "I on my part start from a presupposition in presupposing myself;
but my presupposition does not struggle for its perfection like 'man
struggling for his perfection', but only serves me to enjoy it and
consume it. I consume my presupposition, and nothing else, and exist
only in consuming it. But that presupposition is therefore not a
presupposition at all: for, as I am the unique, I know nothing of the
duality of a presupposing and presupposed ego (an 'incomplete' and a
'complete' ego or man); but this, that I consume myself, means only
that I am. I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just
positing or creating myself, and am I only by being not presupposed
but posited, and, again, posited only in the moment when I posit
myself; that is I am the creator and creature" (Stirner, 1995:135).

48 Cf Stirner's "self-determined" ego (Marx and Engels, 1976:308) and
Derrida's notion of the self in Derrida, 1997:16-22 and 1998:304.

49 I use the term "subjective idealism" here in the same sense as
Lukacs. "The dissolution of Hegelianism, before Marx took the decisive
step to the materialist overthrow of Hegelian dialectics, has the
peculiarity that the attempts to break through the Hegelian barriers
engendered a retrograde movement in these questions objectively. Bruno
Bauer, in the effort to develop Hegelian dialectics further in a
revolutionary way, lapsed into the extreme subjective idealism of a
'philosophy of self-consciousness'. By thus caricaturing ­as the young
Marx was already demonstrating at the time -- the subjectivist aspects
of the Phenomenology, and by reducing Hegel to Fichte, he too
eliminated the social and historical motives from dialectics and made
them far more abstract than they were in Hegel himself; he thus
de-historicised and de-socialised dialectics. This tendency reaches
its climax which tilts over into the absurdly paradoxical with
Stirner" (1980: 254-5). Cf Leopold's introduction to Stirner, 1995.

50 Paterson, 1971: 107.

51 Thomas, 1980; also Patterson, 1971 and Leopold, 1995.

52 Marx and Engels, 1976:142.

53 Ibid, 143.

54 Thomas, 155.

55 Ibid 142.

56 Ibid 147.

57 Marx clearly has a concept of historically specific social
relations in The German Ideology. It arose from his break with the
Feuerbach specifically in response to Stirner's critique of Feuerbach
and Marx. "The more the normal form of intercourse [social relations]
and with it the conditions of the ruling class, develop their
contradiction to the advanced productive forces, and the greater the
consequent discord within the ruling class itself as well as between
it and the class ruled by it, the more fictitious, of course, becomes
the consciousness which originally corresponded to this form of
intercourse (i.e., it ceases to be the consciousness corresponding to
this form of intercourse), and the more to the old traditional ideas
of these relations of intercourse, in which actual private interests,
etc., are expressed as universal interests, descend the level of mere
idealising phrases, conscious illusion, deliberate hypocrisy. But the
more their falsity is exposed by life, and the less meaning they have
for consciousness itself, the more resolutely are they asserted, the
more hypocritical, moral and holy becomes the language of this normal
society" (Marx and Engels, 1976:310). Also: "That money is a necessary
product of definite relations of production and intercourse and
remains a "truth" so long as these relations exist -- this, of course
is of no concern to a holy man like Saint Max, who raises his eyes
towards heaven and turns his profane backside to the profane world"
(ibid: 219). Cf Callinicos, 1985: 44-46.

58 Marx and Engels, 1976: 97.

59 Thomas, 146.

60 Derrida, 1994:30.

61 1996: 40.

62 Ibid: 38.

63 Ahmed, 1994.

64 Callincos 1991. Cf Trotsky's position that the "degenerate workers'
states" were a contradictory unity of workers property and stalinist
state power which could only be resolved by political revolution or
social counter-revolution (1972). Lewis (1999) repeats Callinicos'
argument in more detail, charging Derrida with ignorance of "state
capitalism". It is beyond the scope of this paper to further develop
the significant differences between these contending positions.
Nevertheless because Derrida's ignorance of Marxism is most profound
on the question of method I don't think that the state capitalist
position can possibly correct it.

65 Compare Marx on Stirner's self-determination as "absence of
determination" (Marx and Engels,1976: 309) and Derrida on the
messianic as "opening to the future or to the coming of the other as
the advent of justice". This is a discursive fantasy where Derrida
imagines a desert preceding "all determinate community, all positive
religion . . . it would link pure singularities prior to any social or
political determination, prior to all intersubjectivity, prior to the
opposition between the sacred and the profance". Such a link would
allow a new respect and tolerance . . . without this desert in the
desert, there would be neither act of faith, nor promise, nor future,
nor expectancy without expectation of death and of the other, nor
relation to the singularity of the other" (1998:16-22).

66 Callinicos' rejects commodity fetishism on philosophical and
political grounds. Philosophically, he rejects any necessary link
between social relations and consciousness, and specifically a link
between exchange relations and bourgeois ideology. Thus the whole
basis of Marx critique of fetishism which turns relations between men
into relations between things as the source of ideology is rejected.
Politically, Callinicos says that if fetishism is allowed then this
suggests that "capitalism can reproduce itself indefinitely". Both of
these grounds are wrong. By avoiding Marx's reified individual
Callinicos apparently avoids "pessimism". In its place he puts a
groundless, fatalistic "optimism" based on an idealist notion of
spontaneous class consciousness that must lead to workers remaining
trapped by fetishised exchange relations (1985:131). Nor do I think
that Eagleton's warnings against "fetishism" are valid (1986:75). For
an excellent discussion of the importance of Marx's method and the
theory of commodity fetishism in Marxism, see Rubin, 1973. For its
application to the theory of the party see Lukacs, 1970 and 1971.

67 Briefly, the failure of materialist dialectics in Western Marxism
results from the split between objective and subjective reality that
can be united only in the programme of the revolutionary party.
Callinicos cannot transcend this split because his stance is one of
objective idealism in which the working class (rather than humanity)
acts spontaneously, unmediated by the revolutionary unity of theory
and practice in the party which is necessary to penetrate fetishised
reality. On the other hand, Derrida is attempting to revise Marxism as
a left-Hegelian subjective idealism. In both cases the self-activity
of the individual is dehistoricised either by abstracting from social
relations in Derrida's case, or by abstracting from the alienated
bourgeois subject in Callinicos' case.

68 1986:87.

69 1996:87, 1995.

70 Laclau, 1995; Critchley, 1995.

71 1995:95.

72 1999:9 There are strong echoes here of Jameson's endorsement of
"weak messianism".

73 1980:404, 411.

74 1996:40-41 n.7.

75 See Callinicos' discussion in 1987: ch. 5.

76 See Marx on Stirner: "The unity of sentimentality and bragging is
rebellion" (Marx and Engels, 1976:318) and "By rebellion we make a
leap into the new, egotistical world" (ibid: 399). Compare Benjamin
who sought to eliminate the "autonomous individual" of bourgeois
culture and replace him/her with the critical intellectual who used
dialectial materialism to destroy capitalism by means of critique
which could explode the contradiction in the commodity at its point of
highest tension -- the dialectical image (Pensky, 1993; Lowy, 1996;
Wohlfarth, 1996).

77 1999:248-9.

78 1999:253-4.

79 "For Saint Sancho however, self-determination does not even consist
in will, but in indifference to any kind of determinateness...if Saint
Sancho saves himself from determination by his leap into absence of
determination . . . then the practical, moral content of the whole
trick . . . is merely an apology for the vocation forced on every
individual in the world as it has existed so far. If, for example, the
workers assert in their communist propaganda that the vocation,
designation, task of every person is to achieve all-round development
of all his abilities, including . . . the ability to think, Saint
Sancho sees in this only the vocation to something alien, the
assertion of the "holy". He seeks to free them from this by defending
the individual who had been crippled by the division of labour at the
expense of his abilities and relegated to a one-sided vocation against
his own need to become different. . . . The all-rounded realisation of
the individual will only cease to be conceived as an ideal, a
vocation, etc., when the impact of the world which stimulates the real
development of the abilities of the individual is under the control of
the individuals themselves, as the communists desire" (Marx and
Engels,1976:308-309 also 463). I would argue that this projected
communist individual is the unity of theory and practice, which
theoretically is foreshadowed in the party cadre of the Communist
Party (Bolshevik).

80 Benjamin's "marxism" had an idealist residue. This could be seen to
result from his efforts to escape the crude (vulgar marxist)
determinism of Stalinism, and his own personal isolation and
intellectual standpoint. On Adorno's and Brecht's views on Benjamin
see Broderson, 1996: 233-239.

81 Pensky, 1993:211-239.

82 Benjamin's rejection of the "party" was probably more the effect of
his isolation from the working class, than a cause of it. There is
obviously no direct relationship between actual historic party
membership and the incipient 'communist' individual Marx projects in
the Germany Ideology. First, after 1924 the actually existing party
was Stalinist and repressed or even murdered its dissidents. This
meant that the "Left opposition" had few mass roots that could have
sustained a "collective" proleterian culture. It would be interesting
to compare the long-term legacy of Benjamin with his younger brother
Georg who joined the party in 1923 and died in a concentration camp in
1942 (Broderson, 1996: 208).

83 See Broderson (1996:261) for an account that shows that Benjamin
was but one of countless victims of fascism. His decision to kill
himself in Port Bou on the French/Spanish border rather than be
returned to Vichy France and to a concentration camp, followed frantic
but futile phone calls to the US Consulate in Barcelona, and
tragically occurred during a short period of one day when the Spanish
authorities refused entry.

84 1996:70-72.

85 Thomas,1980:142.

86 Specifically Benjamin's uncompromising attitude towards the
"independence" of cultural history which for him is reduced to the
history of class struggle! What about some Benjamin studies in place
of "cultural studies"? (See Wohlfarth 1996.)

87 Following Marx, Lenin, Lukacs and Trotsky, my view of materialist
dialectics is that it unites objective and subjective reality in the
unity of theory and practice of communists. Since Lenin this
formulation has been expressed as the unity of theory and practice in
the organisation and programme of a democratic centralist party.
Intellectual critiques of Derrida's deconstruction do not unite theory
with practice unless they are translated into a revolutionary
programme and put into effect by a revolutionary party as the
"proletarian scientist". Specifically, Derrida's politics would favour
an individual contract between a worker and a boss. Since all work is
"here/now" this contract should be very flexible. From a materialist
dialectical standpoint, the revolutionary party would attempt to sign
up individual workers to collective contracts that are enforceable by
collective action such as the closed shop. In the process workers
would be educated by the experience of winning more favourable
conditions, exposing the "performativity" of the isolated worker as
one determined by exploitative social relations rather than the
"affirmation of the other".

88 1999:231.

89 This breaking of the unity is an attempt by the petty bourgeios
intelligentsia to "incorporate" the "servicable" parts of Marxism and
"purify" the rest. Thus separating the exchange moment reduces
exploitation to unequal exchange the province of the trade union
bureaucray; freezing the distributional moment reduces exploitation to
power relations and the maldistribution of wealth which can be
reformed by parliament. . . . Freezing the consumption moment, reduces
the notion of exploitation to individual errors of choice and hence to
caveat emptor.

90 Derrida, 1999:237.

91 Marx and Engels, 1976:310.

92 Cf Ebert, 1996.

93 1994:40.

94 Ibid:52.

95 Ibid:81.

96 Ibid:31-32.

97 Just as in the 1890's Max Weber borrowed from Marx in order to
suborn him (Clarke, 1982) so in the 1990's Derrida repays his debt to
Marx by "buying him cheap and selling him dear". Marx rejects the
analysis of capitalism based on exchange-relations where profits
"apparently" derive from "buying cheap and selling dear". Similarly, I
reject Derrida's re-appropriation of Marx as similarly superficial
because he "profits" from the "appearance" that Marx stands for
distributional social justice rather than the revolutionary "essence"
which is the socialisation of the means of production to produce
use-values to meet needs.

98 Ibid: 59; 68. Rorty picks up on this when he says that Derrida
"betrays his own project" by offering a view which is not totally
devoid of "all dialectics, all theology, all teleology, all ontology"
(1991:92-91). Rorty obviously sees Derrida as genuinely keeping alive
some of the misconceived totalising spirits of Marx. He accuses
Derrida of offering a "new metavocabulary which claims superior
status" (1991:94).

99 1994:88-89.

100 1994:68.

101 See Lukacs, 1980. Specifically on post-1945 irrationalism (765-853).

102 1994:87-90.

103 Ibid 14, 14, 30. See also more recent statements along the sames
lines in Derrida 1997 and 1998.

104 Stirner's ego is an idealist essence because it abstracts from
social relations and inserts a concept of the free ego. The
"association of egos" is therefore meaningless. As Marx says of
Stirners rebellion: "The difference between revolution and Stirner's
rebellion is not, as Stirner thinks, that the one is a political and
social act while the other is an egoistical act, but that the former
is an act while the latter is no act at all. The whole senselessness
of the antithesis that Stirner puts forward is evident at once from
the fact that he speaks of "the Revolution" as a juridical person,
which has to fight against "what exists", another juridical person"
(ibid: 400).

105 Marx continues: "They entered into intercourse with one another as
what they were, they proceeded "from themselves", as they were,
irrespective of their "outlook on life". This "outlook on life" --
even the warped one of the philosophers -- could, of course, only be
determined by their actual life. Hence it certainly follows that the
development of an individual is determined by the development of all
the others with whom [s]he is directly or indirectly associated, and
that the different generations of individuals entering into relation
with one another are connected with one another, that the physical
existence of the later generations is determined by that of their
predecessors, and that these later generations inherit the productive
forces and forms of intercourse [productive relations] accumulated by
their predecessors, their own mutual relations being determined
thereby. In short, it is clear that development takes place and that
the history of a single individual cannot possibly be separated from
the history of preceding or contemporary individuals, but is
determined by this history" (1976:463).

106 1994: 85-86.

107 Ahmad, 1994:103.

108 1999:241-2.

109 See Hamacher's (1999) sympathetic interpretation of this point. It
is not too difficult to see that Derrida's notion of performativity is
the (post) modern version of the existential, irrational subject. See
Lukacs on the "Ash Wednesday of Parasitical Subjectivism" (1980: 489
passim).

110 See Soros, 1998: 6-27, and Giddens, 1995.

111 Crisis is understood here following Mattick, 1981.

112 Pilling, 1986.

113 Giddens, 1995:247.

114 Marx and Engels, 1962: 43-45.

115 Marx, 1973:99.

116 Hayek, 1935.

117 Despite his disclaimers and attempts to purge filiation,
fraternity, paternity etc of the authority of the pre-existing
everything (history), it seems to me that the logic of Derrida's whole
method is that of the priest/demagogue/saviour who speaks to the
masses of the religion of pure egoism as personal salvation -- his
message? "faith, hope, charity". . .

118 On this point see Deb Kelsh (1998).

119 Trotsky, 1971:62.

120 Derrida, 1994:7

121 Cf. Callinicos' view that Marx confuses technical and social
relations in The German Ideology (1985:131).

122 Here I follow Lukacs' brilliant exposition of the Communist (i.e.
Bolshevik) Party as the "conscious" vanguard of the proletariat. I
cite only one passage: "The pre-eminently practical nature of the
Communist Party, the fact that it is a fighting party presupposes its
possession of a correct theory, for otherwise the consequences of a
false theory would soon destroy it. Moreover, it is a form of
organisation that produces and reproduces correct theoretical insights
by consciously ensuring that the organisation has built into it ways
of adapting with increase sensitivity to the effects of a theoretical
posture. Thus the ability to act, the faculty of self-criticism, of
self-correction and of theoretical development all co-exist in a state
of constant interaction. The Communist Party does not function as a
stand-in for the proletariat even in theory. If the class
consciousness of the proletariat viewed as a function of the thought
and action of the class as a whole is something organic and in a state
of constant flux, then this must be reflected in the organised form of
that class consciousness, namely in the Communist Party. . . . Thus in
the theory of the party the process, the dialectic of class
consciousness becomes a dialectic that is consciously deployed"
(1971:327-8).

123 E.g. Lukacs, 1970, 1971; Lenin, 1976; Trotsky, 1975.

http://clogic.eserver.org/2-2/bedggood.html

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