Elliott Odyssey Hirst

8/6/2019 Elliott Odyssey Hirst

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Gregory Elliott

Over the last decade and a half, widespread shifts have occurred within

Britains Left intelligentsia, in a complex series of changes, with many cross-currentsmaking for an intellectual and political scene today very different

from that of the early 70s. Some of these changes have been challenging and

radicalizing: most obviously, the rise of a new and confident feminism. Others

have been involutionary, or retrogressivetrends that might be summarized

as the transition from subscription to some variant of Marxism and commit-

ment to revolutionary socialism, in one form or another (accompanied by

the normal correlate: rejection of the local representatives of social democracy)

to thorough-going theoretical renunciations and pronounced political moder-atism (predictably accompanied by reorientation to the centre and right of

the Labour Party and disdain for its supposedly hard left). The figure of

Paul Hirst, Professor of Social Theory at Birkbeck College, sometime editor

of three journals, frequent contributor to others as well as to numerous

collections, author or co-author of eight books, occupies a prominent yet

The Odyssey of Paul Hirst

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particular position within this latter constellation. His has been in manyways an exemplary career, typical of the trajectory of not a few of hisgeneration, yet also preceding or exaggerating more general alterationsof outlook and disposition. Although matre dcole of a discourse theorythat has established certain bridge-heads in a number of academicdisciplines (sociology, anthropology, cultural and media studies) andmainstream publishers lists, it is less breadth of influence than sharpness

of stance that distinguishes Hirsts postures today. His novelty is thealacrity and ruthlessness with which he has settled accounts with hiserstwhile theoretico-political consciousnessto the extent of pioneeringmuch of the current commonsense of Marxism Today and its cousinswell before it was in full vogue, yet moving further to the right evenas others were coming round to what were once his somewhat rarefiedrevisions. Paul Hirst is not the, or even an, minence grise of thatcontemporary English hybrid, Eurolabourism; but he is one of theunsung heroes of the de- and re-alignment of Communist, Labour andindependent Marxist intellectuals, whose theoretical contribution tosuch transformations warrants some retracing, however selective.*

1. Class of 68

Hirsts emphatic appearance on the public scene began in 1971 with thelaunching of the journal Theoretical Practice, of which he was a primemover. Theoretical Practice declared that its ambition was to establishthe necessity and irreducibility of theoretical practice in the British

revolutionary movement, and to demarcate genuine Marxism from itscompetitors, thereby assisting in the recommencement of the scientificpractice of historical materialism and the development of Marxist-Leninist political practice.1 The task was rendered urgent by theappearance in English of texts by Lukcs, Korsch, Gramsci, Marcuseand Sartre and the contemporary efflorescence of interest in Marxism,Western and Classical. The problem we face, as the first issue succinctlyput it, is no longer ignorance, but eclecticism.2 The basis upon whichthe indicated discrimination was to be made was the work of LouisAlthusser, whose major writings had recently become available to an

anglophone audience. In their first statement of intent, the editorsconfided their belief that no development of scientific Marxism ispossible which does not start from what Althusser has achieved.3

Theoretically, then, Theoretical Practice was to be Althusserian. Politi-cally, it was to be Marxist-Leninist. For while the journal gave priorityto theoretical struggle and education, our position, it insisted, doesnot imply theoreticism, i.e., the development and practice of theoryapart from politics and the class struggle . . . Scientificity in theorydemands a correct and militant political position. This journal is politi-cally situated within the anti-revisionist movement, i.e. it is Marxist-

Leninist (against distortions in Marxism-Leninism by Trotskyist, neo-

* I am grateful to Sarah Baxter and John Taylor for their help with this article; needless to say, neither

bears any responsibility for the end-product.1 Editorial, Theoretical Practice 3/4, Autumn 1971, p. 2.2 TP 1, 1971, p. 14. See also Editorial, p. 3.3 Editorial, TP 1, p. 1.

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Stalinist and humanist ideology).4 For all this affirmation, the contentsof the journal were to be distinctly apolitical in any mundane sense.Some relationship to the official Chinese outlook of the time can besurmised, but its extent probably varied considerablysome contribu-tors perhaps swallowing large doses of Pekings political line, while forothers Maoism may have been a residual sympathy after the (revisionist)alternatives enumerated in the editorial to TP 1 had, on Althusserian

grounds, been eliminated.5 At any rate for all, the class struggle intheory was the order of the day: Theoretical Practices theoretical workis philosophical in this sense. It is an intervention in a particularconjuncture. We have attempted to specify the characteristics of thisconjuncture: the dominance of revisionist political and theoretical pos-itions in the British revolutionary movement and, on a wider scale, theabsence of a correct conception of historical materialism and of ascientific practice of historical materialism. We have maintained that thephilosophical recovery of the scientific concepts of historical materialism

is the dominant task to be undertaken in the struggle against revisionismand an essential pre-condition for the creation of a Marxist-Leninistparty.6 In Britain at least, theory was politics.

With the second issue of Theoretical Practice, Hirst made his debutentering the lists to defend the new definition of philosophy adumbratedby Althusser in 1968. His exposition of it revealed him an orthodoxAlthusserian at this stage. Marxism was composed of two autonomoustheories, a science and a philosophy. The former was historical material-ism, the science of historyan anti-humanist, anti-historicist, anti-economistic theory of modes of production and social formations.The latter was a revolutionary practice of philosophysimultaneouslypolitical intervention in theory and theoretical intervention in politicsto which Althusser referred by the traditional designation of dialecticalmaterialism. Its role was the defence of the sciences, including historicalmaterialism, against myriad ubiquitous ideologies. In line with thisprogramme, the next (double) issue of the journal was devoted toMarxism and the Sciences. It contained items by some of Althusserspupils, explorations of the relations between Althusser and Bachelard,

discussion of the concept of epistemological break, reflections fromBarry Hindess (who now joined the editorial board) on materialistmathematics, and a critique of Foucaults Archaeology of Knowledge,charging it with a perilous epistemological neutralityalthough, itshould be said, the editors evinced general sympathy for modern Frenchphilosophy of science, and for Freud in a Lacanian rendering, aspotential theoretical allies of Marxism. By the spring of1972, whenHirst joined the editorial board, the site of struggle had tended to shiftfrom dialectical to historical materialism, as a new issue concentratedon Marxs Marginal Notes on Adolph WagnersLehrbuch der Politischen

konomieone of only two items in the canon certified by Althusser

4 lbid, p. 3. See also Editorial, TP 2, Aped 1971, p. 4, and Editorial, TP 3/4, p. 3.5 For some light on the journals relations with Marxist-Leninist organizations in Britain, see John

Taylor and David Macey, The Theoreticism of Theoretical Practice, London 1974, pp. 4244.6 Editorial, TP 3/4, p. 6.

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in 1969 as being without the shadow of a trace of Feuerbachian-humanist or Hegelian influence.7

Some time in the following months, however, both Hindess and Hirstresigned from the journalapparently because of a disagreement withthe assessment of priorities set out in an editorial to what in the eventproved to be the final number ofTheoretical Practice. At issue, evidently,

was the decision to focus on historical materialism, though no detailswere forthcoming. In the event, the unruffled confidence expressed bythe remaining editors was belied by the pages that followed. For whiletexts by Althusser and Lecourt drew out some of the implications ofthe second definition of philosophy previously endorsed by Hirst, in adissenting register Anthony Cutler and Michael Gane argued the virtuesof Althussers original theory of theoretical practice and the vices of itssupposed rectification. Moreover on the terrain of historical materialismitself, a letter from Cutler to Etienne Balibar occasioned a responsewhich dismayed his correspondent. Cutler had queried a number ofthemes in Balibars contribution to Reading Capitalrelating to thekey category of structural causalityin particular, his discussions ofdetermination in the last instance and historical transition. In the Self-Criticism this elicited, Balibar repudiated both the whole project of ageneral theory of modes of production (as one of typologistic orstructuralist inspiration), anda fortiori of any general theory of tran-sition from one mode of production to another.8 Cutlers Responsemade no attempt to conceal his disappointment. In conjunction withAlthussers own work, Balibars original paper had entirely revolution-

ized the science of history; retraction of it conduced to empiricism andwas liable to open the door to revisionism.9 An acerbic review byanother contributor, Athar Hussain, of Maurice Godeliers Rationality

and Irrationality in Economics brought the issue, and with it the life-spanof the journal, to an end.

A philosophy does not make its appearance in the world as Minervaappeared to the society of Gods and men, Louis Althusser remarkedin 1975.10 What were the historical characteristics of the particularconjuncture in which Theoretical Practice appeared? Under what balance

of forces was a collective attempt to naturalize Althussers Marxism forthe purpose of cadre formation, with the aim of putting the revolution-ary movement on a sound scientific footing, a matter of some moment?The conditions of possibility of this exercise lay in the electric inter-national, and national, atmosphere of the time: a world-wide solidaritycampaign against the US war in Vietnam; a radical student movementacross four continents; major proletarian revolts in France and Italy;Black insurrections in America; renewal in Czechoslovakia and upheavalin China; and at home the moral collapse of Labour in office, and theeruption of the most successful mass workers struggles in Britain thiscentury. This was the crucible in which the class of 68 was formed andunder the impact of which it rallied, often in apocalyptic mood, to the

7Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New Left Books, London 1971, p. 99.8 Etienne Balibar, Self-Criticism, TP 7/8, January 1973, pp. 5672.9 TP 7/8, p. 83.10 Essays in Self-Criticism, New Left Books, London 1976, p. 165.

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cause of socialist revolution. Yet no hint of this was ever to be foundin the pages of Theoretical Practice itself. There, the programme of adefence and development of historical materialism as the prerequisitefor the formation of a revolutionary party apparently forbade anyreference to politics, even as it implied a year zero of Marxist theory inBritain. A decade later, Hirst was to remark that on its importationinto England Althussers Marxism exerted a considerable attraction

on social scientists as a general philosophical system and alternativemetaphysics . . . as a methodology but not as a means of analysis ofpolitical situations. By contrast Theoretical Practice, he claimed, hadsubscribed to the authentic Althusserian conception of historical material-ism as fundamentally a theory of politics and as providing theoreticaltools for the assessment of political situations.11 A calmer reliance onthe amnesia of its reader would be hard to conceive. For if the generalposition of the journal was that Marxism must be developed as thescience of historyhence of politicsit never actually got round tothe slightest concrete analysis of any concrete situation, let alone toproposing a Marxist-Leninist strategy for turbulent contemporary Bri-tain. Moreover, one of the British social scientists for whom Althussersgeneral philosophical system exercised the greatest attraction was Hirsthimself.

Hyper-Althusserianism, Highest Stage of Marxism

Indeed, while still editors ofTheoretical Practice, Hirst and Hindess hadjoined the board of a new academic journal, Economy and Society, whose

first issue in February 1972 announced the social sciences to be in a stateof crisis, itself promising an attempt to contribute to the scholarshiprequired to repair their plight.12 In its pages Hirst and Hindess inveighedagainst the theoretical poverty of contemporary British sociology, pro-posing to remedy it by the introduction of the advanced theoreticalworks of Althusser, Bachelard, Foucault, Koyr and Lacan.13 Thenecessary corrective to prevailing indiscipline, and characteristic productof their writing in the journal, was a series of epistemological critiquesof the problematic governing errant authors such as Durkheim ortheir schools. These were examined for symptoms of illicit theoretical

ideologiesempiricism, historicism, humanism etc.and, where con-victed, were rejected in the name and in favour of a truly scientificproblematic: Althussers.14

Yet by early 1974 Hindess and Hirst were no longer on the editorialboard ofEconomy and Society. Setting out the reasons for their resignationa year later, they violently denounced the academicism of the journal,and criticized themselves for their collaboration with it. The programmeof Economy and Society was merely anti-empiricistnot committed toany definite theory of the social totality (read: Althussers). Theyhad persevered because they believed it to furnish a medium for

11Marxism and Historical Writing, London 1985, p. 133.12 Editorial, Economy and Society 1:1, February 1972, pp. iiiiv.13 See especially Paul Hirst, Recent Tendencies in Sociological Theory, ES 1:2, May 1972, pp. 21628.14 Some of this material was later collected in HirstsDurkheim, Bernard and Epistemology, London 1975.

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disseminating advanced theory to the social scientific intelligentsiaand for criticizing the empiricism of the social sciences. When thecontradictions of this project proved unbearable, they had proposed adrastic change of direction: a leftist and Marxist journal which wouldnot merely provide a venue for progressive theory, but also carryarticles relevant to current politics. But this prospectus had been turneddown by their colleagues, and so they had resigned. Happily, as it

transpired. For even their closing bid on Economy and Society had beenvitiated by a progressivist variant of culturalism, as indeed had beentheir position on Theoretical Practice. Now, however, they had seen theerror of their waysthat they had been pursuing no more than atheoretical equivalent of Eurocommunist and social-democratic strat-egy. Instead of devoting themselves to educational work to form Marxistcadres for the analysis of the current conjuncture in Britain and for thenucleus of a Leninist party, they would henceforward give priority tothe analysis of the present conjuncture and the production of theoreticalwork necessary to that analysis. Rather than train others to this end,Hindess and Hirst announced their own dedication to it, and the newsthat they had begun the necessary labours on monopoly and financecapitalism.15

The song remains the samewith the slight, but crucial difference thatin the course of their mea culpa Hindess and Hirst now criticizedtheir philosopher-general for the first time. Previously, the theoreticaluniverse had been manichean. An outpost within it was enlightened:Althusserianism and its avant-garde allies. The remainder was benighted:

all rival claimants to the title of Marxism and every other form of socialthought, each ideological or idealist to greater or lesser degree. Now,however, Hindess and Hirst had detected a flaw in the French philos-opher himself. Althusser, it emerged, was complicit with WesternMarxism in so far as he retained the very notion of Marxism as a scienceof history. If the problem of Economy and Society was that it was notAlthusserian at all, Althussers was that he was not Althusserian enough.Marxism, Hirst and Hindess insisted in a passage of some significancefor their later work, is anti-historical because it is committed to historyin another meaning of the work, to the crucial struggles of our age.

Yet the notion of Marxism as a theory or science of history is almostuniversal in western Marxist philosophy, whatever its tendency. EvenAlthusser attempts to provide the philosophical foundation for a sci-ence of history . . . This philosophers Marxism almost overshadowsAlthussers main project, namely, to make Marxism once again atheoretical force, to reconstitute a Marxism once again capable ofanalysing the political conjunctures of the current period and of provid-ing strategic leadership for political practice. It is this uncompletedproject that needs to be continued.16 In short, Hindess and Hirst had

become plus royalistes que le roi. Marxism was not a theory of historyafter all, but a political theory, one directed towards a definite

15 Letter to Economy and Society, ES 4:2, May1975, pp. 235, 24144.Hindess and Hirst also belabouredcertain of Althussers followers for lapsing into mere depoliticized epistemological critique.

Unbowed, the editorial board issued a sharp rejoinder: Reply to Hindess and Hirst, loc. cit., pp.

24448.16 Letter to Economy and Society, pp. 23839.

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politics.17 If For Marx and Reading Capital, till now the apogee ofscientificity, had on inspection proved to be infected with Westernmetaphysics, then the requisite science of the current conjuncture hadto be refounded before any concrete analysis or strategic guidance ofvalue could be forthcoming.

2. The Forward March of the Productive Forces

Halted

In 1975 Hindess and Hirsts first full-length work,Pre-Capitalist Modesof Production, was published. Its ambition was to develop a theory ofmodes of production distinct from either Balibars On the Basic Con-cepts of Historical Materialism (now perceived as a philosophicalenterprise) or his Self-Criticism (condemned as empiricist). Its authorsrejected the project of a general theory of modes of production asscientifically unfounded, the effect of a teleological and idealist philos-

ophy of history,18

and Balibars own version as a mere structuralistvariant of it. The object of the work would not be the analysis ofconcrete pre-capitalist social formations, but the interrogation of thetheoretical status and validity of certain abstract general concepts withinthe Marxist theory of modes of productionan undertaking justifiedby the consideration that such concepts were theoretical means for theproduction of knowledge of concrete social formations and of concreteconjunctures, in other words, the tools that make it possible.19

Whilst Marxs 1859Preface emphatically did not license an economic

determinist interpretation of Marxism, neither did it provide a rigorousbasis for the construction of Marxist concepts. Nor was it innocent ofimputing a universal mechanism of transition from one mode ofproduction to anothernamely, the trans-historical contradictionbetween forces and relations of production. In a properly Marxisttheory, modes of production must be conceived neitherin the fashionof Althusser and Balibaras self-reproducing Spinozist eternities,whose replacement is a matter of untheorizable hazard, norin themanner of Stalinas self-subversive historical forms, whose quasi-Hegelian supersession is a matter of predetermined necessity. What,

then, was a mode of production? In a move at variance with Marxsown pronouncements, Hirst and Hindess defined it as an articulatedcombination of relations and forces of production structured by thedominance of the relations of production.20 Any mode of productionin its turn required certain conditions of existence (economic, ideologi-cal and/or political) to be secured and reproduced in a given socialformation.

Once the primacy of productive forces was displaced by that of relationsof production, wherein lay the principal dynamic of history? Hirst andHindesss answer was that the reproduction, modification or transform-ation of the conditions of existence of a mode of production was the

17 Ibid, p. 236.18Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, London 1975, pp. 5, 7.19PCMP, pp. 18, 9.20 SeePCMP, pp. 910.

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outcome of the class struggles ceaselessly traversing a social formation.The transition from one mode of production to another was, potentiallyand contingently, effected by such struggles interrupting the repro-duction of the dominant relations of production, thus of the mode ofproduction. Class struggle was no mere executor of an evolutionarydrama whose real protagonist was progressively developing productiveforces, and whose plot was the sundering of the retarded relations of

production fettering them; it was thefons et origo of the transition itself.The teleological causality hitherto prevalent in Marxist thought, ofwhich Althussers structural causality was merely a mutation, shouldmake way for a material causality according primacy to what hasalways been essential to Marxist theory, namely, the role of the classstruggle in history.21

A Maoist Theoreticism

The Maoist provenance of such motifs is evident enough. But it shouldbe stressed that in Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production they are firmlysubordinated to a defiant theoreticism. For in tandem with the apparentelevation of the class struggle to first mover of history ran an epistemo-logical polemic against the relevance of any historical research. Hindessand Hirst now attacked Althussers account of knowledge as contami-nated by empiricism; for it had retained a realist postulatethe suspectnotion of an object of knowledge that could appropriate in thought aconcrete real object. Althussers epistemology, in point of fact, hadalways been marked by a characteristic tension between realism and

conventionalism. Hindess and Hirst now radically resolved this in thedirection of the latter. This book, they proclaimed at the outset, is awork of scientific Marxist theory. As such, its central propositionscould only be judged in terms of their theoretical rigour and theoreticalcoherence; they could not be refuted by any empiricist recourse to thesupposed facts of history. For, they went on, facts are never given;they are always producedby a scientific practice whose necessity andspecificity would be infringed were it otherwise.22 Hence, quite thereverse of theoretical constructions being confirmed or refuted by anextra-theoretical concrete, it was concepts that make possible and

validate analyses of the concrete.23 The appropriate mode of proofwas therefore to take the pre-capitalist economic formations describedby Marx and Engels, and submit each to the exigencies of Hirst andHindesss own general definition of a mode of production. If it passedthis test, it was a valid concept of the Marxist theory of modes ofproduction. If not, it had no validity in terms of Marxist theory.24

Such claims, however exorbitant, would still seem to allow for someresidual interestif only as a conceptual gymnasiumin the past. But

even this was annulled in the drastic conclusion of the work. There

21PCMP, p. 9.22PCMP, pp. 23. Elsewhere, Hirst was at the same moment claiming that correspondence with thefacts of experience is . . . an absolute guarantee of non-scientificity. ( Durkheim, Bernard andEpistemology, p. 8.)23PCMP, p. 180.24PCMP, p. 18.

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Hirst and his co-author, not merely rejecting historical antiquarianism,berated any conflation between Marxist theoretical work and the histori-ans practice as such. In ringing words they declared: Marxism, as atheoretical and political practice, gains nothing from its association withhistorical writing and historical research. The study of history is notonly scientifically but also politically valueless. The object of history,the past, no matter how it is conceived, cannot affect present conditions.

. . . It is not the present, what the past has vouchsafed to allow us,but the current situation which it is the object of Marxist theory toelucidate and of Marxist political practice to act upon. All Marxisttheory, however abstract it may be, however general its field of appli-cation, exists to make possible the analysis of the current situation.25

Development of Marxist theory was the basic condition of adequateconcrete analysis; such concrete analysis then formed the juncturebetween scientific theory and revolutionary politics. Thus whereastheoretical research was the prelude to scientific socialism, Marxisthistoriography was irrelevant to it, impairing the loop between theoryand practice.

This wholesale rejection of historical materialism was made in the yearthat gave us Hobsbawms Age of Capital, Hills World Turned Upside

Down, Hiltons English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages and ThompsonsWhigs and Huntersa veritableannus mirabilis of Marxist historiography.Even as Britains Marxist historians were producing some of their mostbrilliant work, a volume of scientific Marxist theory was dismissing itas intellectually and politically worthless.26 It is scarcely surprising

that one of the foremost practitioners of that historiography, EdwardThompson, should thereafter have read Althussers own work to a greatextent through the distorting lens of Hirst and Hindess. But in factapoint which bears emphasis in the light of that readingwith Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, Hindess and Hirst had cut adrift fromAlthusser. Marxism was now neither dialectical materialism (a philos-ophy) nor historical materialism (the science of history), but simply atheory of the current conjuncture, and thereby a guide to socialistpolitics. According to their erstwhile English champions, Althusser andBalibar had betrayed their own best epistemological instincts in having

any truck with classical historical materialism. Outbidding them, Hin-dess and Hirst concluded by expressing the conviction that they hadcontributed to an authentically anti-historicist theory of modes ofproduction, whose main future tasks would be rigorous concepts offinance capitalism and the socialist mode of production. Without suchrevolutionary theory, there could be no revolutionary practice: Marxistpolitics is only possible on condition that it is based on theory, that itsproblems, programmes and practice are defined by and subject to thecriticism of theory. This relation between theory and political practiceis the essence of Marxism. . . . It is in the light of this that we considerthe abstractions and generalities in this book to be pertinent to thepresent.27 In this conception, theoretical struggle implicitly becomes

25PCMP, pp. 308, 312.26 For a cogent defence of the indispensability of historical knowledge to the studyand practice

of politics, see Colin Leyss outstandingPolitics in Britain, Verso, London 1986, p. 12.27PCMP, p. 323: the closing lines.

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the highest form of the class struggle and correct politics flow fromcorrectscientifictheory. These or cognate proposals underlie theConclusion toPre-Capitalist Modes of Production and supply a justificationfor a book onpre-capitalist modes of production which devotes consider-able space to demolishing history as a discipline. Hindess and Hirst were,in effect, offering their work as nothing less than a recommencement ofMarxist theory dormantor at least distortedsince Lenin (with the

partial exception of Althusser), and a commencement tout court ofMarxism in Britain.Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production was, as it were, aprolegomenon to any possible future scientific socialism.

In reality, of course, the books taedium historiae amounted to little morethan a summary Marxist replication of aspects of the conventionalistcritique of history launched by Lvi-Strauss in the concluding chapterofThe Savage Mind. Significantly, it was precisely here that Althusserdrew the line at a flirtation with structuralism (of course many wouldargue that his was still a liaison dangereuse); otherwise theoretically moresympathetic to Frances leading anthropologist than Sartre, Althusserhad dissented from Lvi-Strausss attempt to expel history from therealm of the scientific, explicitly seeking inReading Capitalto vindicateit as a science. For Hindess and Hirst, by contrast, all historiographywas irredeemably compromised by empiricism, a mere working up oftainted raw material given it by ideology, recalcitrant to transformationinto scientific knowledge. Quite how the current situation escaped thisstricture, where the past succumbed, was never explained. The denialthat history is a real object might be read, more prosaically, as the view

that history existsis accessibleonly in representations of it which,although real enough in themselves, are inherently ideological. Theextent of Hindess and Hirsts own adherence to even this maxim isindicated by their reliance throughoutPre-Capitalist Modes of Productionon the representations of the historians they denigrate for the rawmaterial of their own theoretical constructions; good for nothing else,empiricists were apparently serviceable for some Generalities I.

Modes and Motors

If all historiography was bunk, the class struggle was nevertheless themotor of history. Andrew Levine has suggested that in the 1960s bothMaoism and Althusserianism led what appears in retrospect to havebeen a revolt against historical materialism, as articulated in Marxs1859Preface.28 The conjunction here of the official doctrine of a post-capitalist state and a dissident variant of Western Marxism is notaccidental, since the Althusserian recasting of historical materialism, ifscarcely just a theoretical relay of Maoist ideology, was not whollyinnocent of connection with it either. At any rate, with the addition ofHindess-Hirstianism the plot thins. InPre-Capitalist Modes of Production

productive forces were denied any effectivity whatsoever, dissolved asan independent variable and reduced to specifications of relations ofproductionfrom which, in any particular mode of production, theycould be deduced. Forces of production were not, as in Marx, themeans of production (objects plus instruments of production) and labour

28 Andrew Levine,Arguing for Socialism, London 1984, p. 163.

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power; they referred to the articulation of the elements of the labourprocess . . . not to the elements themselves.29 In company with manyothers, Hindess was about this time deploring the political consequencesof the thesis of the primacy of productive forces in Stalinist Russia. Butthe political consequences of its inversionthe claim for primacy ofthe relations of productionhad a dramatic contemporary illustrationthe Cultural Revolution in Maoist China. Technological determinism

has no monopoly on the tragedies that have befallen revolutionarystates. The blatantly idealist and voluntarist belief that socialism can bebuilt regardless of material conditions (in other words, that highlydeveloped productive forces are notone of its necessary conditions) haswreaked more than its own share of havoc for the reputation ofMarxism.

If this was the political upshot of the eclipse of forces of productionbytheir sheer derivation fromrelations of production, what wereits theoretical implications? Once the contradiction between forces and

relations was abolished, class struggle alone could operate historicaltransformations from one mode of production to another. Even withinHindess and Hirsts own framework this failed to do the (transitional)trick. For their modes of productionarticulated, as opposed tocontradictory, combinations of forces and relations of productionwere quite as immortal as anything to be found in the pages ofReadingCapital. The transition from one to another could only be conceived asthe aleatory outcome of struggles located elsewhereat the politicaland ideological levelsand not theorized as such. Class struggle floats

free of its anchorage in determiinant modes of production to assume thestatus of an unmoved mover30 which destroys the conditions ofexistence of one mode and ushers in another, equally arbitrarily.

It was in the name of a struggle against evolutionism that Hirst andHindess plunged into this voluntarism, repudiating historical material-ism itselffor better or worse, but indisputably, a theory of historicaltransformation and its direction.31 Conflating causality and inevitability,historical evolution and teleology, Hindess and Hirst were utterlyunreconciled to this legacy of Marx. InPre-Capitalist Modes of Production

they denied its interpretative accuracy; their later realization that it wasa faithful rendition provoked, as we shall see, a different set of responses.But their opposition to it even when Marxists must be underscored.Refusing any truck with a general theory of historical development,and rejecting the pertinence to the presentand futureof understand-ing the past, Hindess and Hirst circumscribed Marxism to a sociologyof discontinuous conjuncturesa gesture subversive of the very projectof a scientific socialism founded on historical materialism. The theoryof the current situation was denied any genuine purchase on the realby conventionalist protocols in which the empirical was confused with

the empiricist; yet was simultaneously granted plenipotentiary powersover it by a rampant rationalism which trumped Althussers epistemo-logical Spinozism itself. Hindess-Hirstian scientific theory was indeed

29PCMP, pp. 1112.30 Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class, Verso, London 1986, p. 81.31 Levine, op. cit., p. 191.

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the index of its own truth and everyone elses falsehood (Althussersincluded). Conceptual construction proceeded via deductions from itsown privileged basic notions. Its products were internally validated andimmune to external refutation (by supposed facts); they also served asso many shibboleths with which to detect theoretical deviations andcertify non-scientificity. Given the extremism of their own excursioninto it, there is perhaps little wonder that shortly after their magnil-

oquent death sentence32 on history, Hindess and Hirst should havedonned the black cap for epistemology too.

3. Critique, Autocritique, Rectification: Post-Althusserianism

Despite their promise eventually to cash their theoretical labours in someconcrete analysis, the guardians of rigour and scourges of opportunism,abstraction from the current situation [and] sloganizing33 never made

it to their construction of yet more concepts (finance capital, socialistmode of production) preliminary to a Marxist analysis of the Britishconjuncture. The royal road to science led to the abandonment ofMarxist theory-as-sciencei.e. toMarxs Capital and Capitalism Today,the first volume of which was published in 1977. While readers werestill digesting the iconoclastic tenets ofPre-Capitalist Modes of Production,these were being transmogrified into an altogether non-Marxist mlange:post-Althusserianism.

The problematization which led to Marxs Capital and Capitalism

Today was released to the public in several instalments. The first signin print of a drastic reorientation came in two essays by Hirst: Althusserand the Theory of Ideology (1976) and Economic Classes and Politics(1977). The critique of the French Marxists conceptions of ideologyand social formation heralded a final breach with the past.

The Marxist theory of ideology had been one of Hirsts interests earlyon. In 1972, while still associated with Theoretical Practice, he had writtena text entitled A Critique of Jacques Rancires and Louis AlthussersTheories of Ideology34 in which he had criticized the formers contri-

bution to Reading Capitalfor structuralism and the latters seminalIdeology and Ideological State Apparatuses for functionalism. Initially,Hirsts ambition had been to repair these defects and construct theveritable Althusserian theory of ideologyto out-Althusser the master,as it were. But he had abandoned this project. Reiterating the chargeof functionalism against Althussers understanding of ideology, Hirstnow concluded that it denoted a more fundamental failure to breakwith economism and class essentialism. Althusser was all too faithfulto the social topography of the 1859 Preface and thus to the conceptand classic problematic of representationnamely, the idea that classes

as social forces exist prior to and independently of representation anddetermine it. The 1859 Preface did after all secrete that tendencytowards vulgar materialism which had been strenuouslyand implausi-

32 Gareth Stedman Jones,Languages of Class, Cambridge 1983, p. 24.33PCMP, p. 323.34 Reprinted in abbreviated form in On Law and Ideology, London 1979, pp. 7595.

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bly (given its authors protocols)denied in Pre-Capitalist Modes ofProduction. Accordingly, this time it was not simply Althussers problem-atic that had to be rejected, but Marxs tooas economistic. In Althus-sers essay on ideology, Hirst now maintained, he had effectively aban-doned the relative autonomy of the political and ideological with whichhe had sought to redeem Marxand of necessity, not by accident,for relative autonomy was a fragile category. Whatever degree of

complexity it introduced into the formula, its use retained the premiseof determination in the last instance by the economyhence eo ipsoeconomism. Representation too was an untenable conception, since itimpliedin defiance of linguistics since Saussurethe existence of anextra-discursive reality somehow represented more or less accuratelyin, say, ideology. Against this was to be set a (post-) structuralistproblematic wherein the supposedly represented exists only as aneffect of a process of signification.35 This axiom was henceforward tobe a core component of post-Althusserian doctrine.

It might be thought that in one limited respect these revisions consti-tuted an advance on Hirsts part. Rather than belabouring everyone elsesince Lenin for insufficient rigour and fidelity to Marxism, he was finallyaccepting that some of the putatively vulgar materialist tendencies hehabitually excoriated were present in Marx. But this was cold comfort.For what the change meant, of course, was that the boundaries oftheoretical rectitude were now simply redrawn to exclude Marx: Marx-ism per se had become vulgar. In place of its incorrigible economism,Hirst appealed to the prospect of a non-reductionist theory of the

political and ideological levels which would conceive social classesas formed and transformed by the conditions of the political represen-tation and its effects, and by ideological social relations.36

Economic Classes and Politics37 pressed home the attack on Classicaland Althusserian Marxism alike. Lenin and Mao had grappled with thespecificity of the political and had come to terms with it in politicalpractice. But they had failed to theorize it, and economism reigned.Althusser had attempted the requisite theorization in Contradiction andOverdetermination. Yet his bid too was a failure: relative autonomy

was cancelled by determination in the last instance, as politics in someway represented an anterior economic reality. This would not do:the notion of relative autonomy is untenable. Once any degree ofautonomous action is accorded to political forces as means of represen-tation vis--vis classes of economic agents, then there is no necessarycorrespondence between the forces that appear in the political (andwhat they represent) and economic classes. It is not simply a questionof discrepancy (the political means represent the class more or lessaccurately) but of necessary non-correspondence. One cannot, despiteLenin, read backmeasuring the political forces against what they

are supposed to represent. That is to conceive the represented as externalto, as the autonomously existent measure of, its means of representation.Classes do not have given interests, apparent independently of definite

35 Ibid., pp. 5153, 6869.36 Ibid., p. 53.37 In Alan Hunt (ed.), Classes and Class Structure, London 1977, pp. 12554.

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parties, ideologies, etc. and against which these parties, ideologies, etc.,can be measured. What the means of representation represent doesnot exist outside of the process of representation. The choice facingMarxism now was: either economism, or the non-correspondence ofpolitical forces and economic classes.38 Naturally, Hirst opted for thelatter of these loaded alternatives. In the new paradigm discourse wassevered from its object, ideology and politics from class. If not (yet) an

adieu to the working class, this was certainly a farewell to the primacyof class struggle. No more than any other form of politics couldsocialismbe grounded in extra-discursive material class interests. Everything wasdiscursively constructed in and by particular political ideologies andmeans of representation.

Marxism, Discourse and Society

The next step in Hirsts radical reformulation of the relations betweendiscourse and reality came withMode of Production and Social Formation(1977)billed explicitly as An Autocritique ofPre-Capitalist Modes of

Production. In their earlier work, Hirst and Hindess had remainedcommitted, whatever their differences with Althusser or Balibar, to atheory of modes of production. In sharp contrast the new book deniedthe pertinence of the concept at all, and with this impertinent itemwent the notion of determination in the last instance.39 While they wereat it, Hindess and Hirst repudiated epistemological discourse itself aswell. This by no means entailed a rejection of theoretical discoursetout court, only of theoriesepistemologiespositing correspondence

between the order of discourse and some extra-discursive order. In theiropening chapter Hindess and Hirst defended an outrconventionalismwhile denying its logical consequence, relativism. Objects of discourse,they announced, do not exist. The entities discourse refers to areconstituted in and by it. Althussers original critique of empiricism wasextended to embrace all epistemologies (including his own, and theirown to date). They now rejected the rationalism that rested theoreticalconstruction or criticism on privileged basic conceptsa modus operandiwhich not only imposed dogmatic closure of discourse but also, in itspostulation of a prior harmony between concept and real object, col-

lapsed the order of things into the order of discourse. No less vehementagainst realism, Hirst and Hindess asserted the impossibility of referenceto extra-discursive objects. At most, theoretical discourses might beexamined with regard to the internal structure of relations betweenconcepts and the levels and forms of inconsistencies entailed in theserelations.40 The world was composed of discursive and extra-discursiverealms; and nothing any longer reunited these two hermetically sealedworlds. The real object, simultaneously honoured and abused byAlthusser, was simply abolished. Such was what might be called the

anti-epistemological break between the Young rationalist-scientificHirst and Hindess, and their mature ideological-discursive selves.

The rest ofMode of Production and Social Formation was devoted to the

38 Ibid., pp. 13031.39Mode of Production and Social Formation, London 1977, pp. 12.40MPSF, pp. 6, 7, 20, 31.

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theoretical and political implications of its affiliation to the revolutionof language. The upshot of these was that the new epistemologicalrelativism paved the way for an old sociological pluralism. As a basicconcept endowed with autoeffectivity,41 the idea of a mode of pro-duction imprisoned Marxism, and should be displaced by that of socialformation. The latter was not to be understood in any Althusseriansense whatever: At most the concept of a determinate social formation

specifies the structure of an economy (forms of production anddistribution, forms of trade, conditions of reproduction of these forms),forms of state and politics and forms of culture and ideology and theirrelations to that economy, economic classes and their relations, and theconditions for a transformation of certain of these forms.42 Socialformations were emphatically not social totalitiesarticulated ensem-bles of structural levels or variant forms of base and superstructure,governed by any causal priority of the economic. They were congeriesof discrete elements which, whilst they might furnish the forms inwhich the conditions of determinate relations of production are secured,were irreducible to their effects. In Theoretical Practice philosophicalanthropology had been considered an epistemological obstacle toconcrete analysis. InPre-Capitalist Modes of Production historical material-ism was identified as another. Now the concept of mode of productionand the notion of epistemology themselves suffered the same fatetheformer indicted for setting limits to analysis: an objection which could,of course, be levelled against any concept, including that of socialformation, in whatever acceptation. As one shrewd critic pointed out,the unintended result of the latest twist in the iconoclastic spiral was a

metaphysics of the concrete which is little more than an incoherentempiricist attack on all conceptual thought.43

Despite their abandonment of mode of production and social totalityas intrinsically epistemological concepts which obstruct fruitful analysisof contingent conjunctures, Hirst and Hindess still insisted that theywere working within Marxism, problematizing but also reconstruc-ting it, so that it could engage with contemporary capitalism. Mode of

Production and Social Formation closed by indicating its authors convictionthat a radical change in concepts and problems is necessary if we areto be able to deal with the social relations and current political problemsthat confront us. A radical change in the basic political outlook of manyMarxist theorists is also necessary if these problems are to becomepossible and pertinent ones for them. By now some of their sympathi-zers might have run out of patience, despairing of ever seeing the oft-promised politically relevant analysis. Forthcoming, however, wouldbe a work in which they and their co-authors had attempted the critiqueofCapitalwe consider necessary for the Marxist analysis of capitalism

today.44

41MPSF, pp. 2829.42MPSF, p. 57.43 Alex Callinicos, Is There a Future for Marxism?, London 1982, p. 190.44MPSF, p. 74.

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4. Reading Capital, or Against Marx

For once the promissory note was honoured. The two volumes of Marxs Capital and Capitalism Today (197778) constitute the post-Althusserian answer to Reading Capital. Recalling something of thegenesis and development of the project five years later, Hirst arguedthat however critical an attitude he and his co-authors had eventually

adopted to their Althusserian and Leninist starting-points, their jointstudy was not merely negative: it also offered a new and distincttheoretical framework.45 The claim betrays what Norman Geras hasrecently described as a double form of amnesia: of content and con-text.46 For the content of this framework was ultimately novel only asregards the modernist discourse in which it was articulated, otherwiseamounting to a not unfamiliar pluralism and reformism. As to context,Hirst characteristically abstracted entirely from current situations. Yetthe environment in which Marxs Capital and Capitalism Today wasconceived was, of course, markedly different from that of the late sixtiesand early seventies, already sufficiently disembodied in Hirsts fleetingallusions of that time. By the later seventies the post-war boom wasover, and worldwide depression had set in. The main beneficiaries ofthe turbulence of the previous years now appeared to be, not the forcesof any radical socialism, but the traditional mass Communist Partiesof Western Europe, each newly wedded to strategies of gradualistmoderationthe Historic Compromise in Italy, the Common Pro-gramme in France, the Pact of Freedom in Spain. The advent ofEurocommunism announced an explicit break with the original aims of

the Third International and the legacy of Leninism in the West. In theEast the red star waned over China with the passing of Mao and thedisowning of the Cultural Revolution. In Britain itself, the Labourregime brought to power by miners strikes had become monetarist

avant la lettre, and conservative in all but name on virtually every issue,domestic or foreign, confronting it: Callaghan presiding over deepeningBritish decline in a spirit of steady as she sinks.

It was this recessive configuration which formed the real backgroundto the intellectual discoveries of Hirst and his colleagues. Whereas the

later sixties had seen a revolt of some of Althussers French disciplesagainst his tacticalor theoreticalpositions in the name of moreradical alternatives, the British equivalent of the later seventies was tobe a rightand not a leftcritique of Althusserianism. As such itcoalesced with other efforts to plot a new reformist course in the West,among them the stirrings of the intellectual right of the CPGBnot vetenjoying the salience in the partys apparatus they would later, butalready impatient with much Marxist baggage and the temporizationsandad hocadjustments of the party leadership. Wider circles of BritainsLeft intelligentsia too were starting to recoil from the strangeat any

rate failedgods they had recently embraced. Marxs Capital andCapitalism Today was thus no bolt from the blue, intimations of splendidand beleaguered isolation notwithstanding. Yet unencumbered byresidual organizational loyalties and any consequent need for ideological

45 SeeMarxism and Historical Writing, pp. 13436.46Literature of Revolution, Verso, London 1986, pp. xvixvii.

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discretion, Hirst and his colleagues could not only cast in more extremeform and in post-Althusserian idiom themesanti-economism, anti-statism, anti-workerismbeing developed in more piecemeal fashionand neo-Gramscian mode on the new right of the Communist Party.They offered to provide a theoretically glamorous rationale for thehumblest of practical accommodations. Positive reorientation in theorytoward the heterogeneity of [social] relations, Hirst explained, paralleled

and could, if taken far enough, guide attempts in political practice toget beyond the workerism and essentialism of existing Marxist andsocialist theories.47 A conventionally reformist politics could now beendowed with impeccably avant-garde credentials.

Announcing that Capital does not provide us with the basis for thekind of work we need to undertake,48 Marxs Capital and CapitalismToday proceeded to a frontal assault on the corpus of classical Marxism.The labour theory of value was, of course, dismissed at the outset.Marxist and non-Marxist economics contested each other on a common

terrain of problems.49 Pursuing unnecessary and unavailing generalexplanations of profits, prices and other phenomena, both posited aunitary determinant of their explananda. Whilst not assenting to theexact terms of Foucaults pronouncements of1966, the post-Althusser-ians thus rallied to the view of the archaeologist of the human sciencesthat there was no profound discontinuity between Marxism and bour-geois economics.50 With the epistemological break between historicalmaterialism and its competitors went the rupture between the Youngand the mature Marx. Althusser and Rancire were wrong after all:

although Capitaldid not exhibit a simple ontology of human labour,much of its architecture could only be sustained by the kind of philo-sophical anthropology deployed in the 1844Manuscripts.51 It was necess-ary to reject this whole problematicand the very idea of exploitationcentral to it, which was untenable. This did not mean that capitalism,economic classes or class struggle did not existonly that they mustbe conceptualized quite differently.52

Equally erroneous were all laws of motion attributed to capitalism byMarx. Economic determinism was anyway a super-historical principle

without foundation. The 1859Preface which set out Marxs materialistconception of history revealed just such a general historical-philosophi-cal theory as he denounced in November 1877a technological deter-minism which represented history as a process with a subject and anend, humanity and communism, respectively.53 Even where, in partsof the Grundrisse and Capital, relations and forces of production hadbeen thought as a unity and dominance assigned to the former, thecrippling postulate of causal priority of the economic had always been

47 On Law and Ideology, pp. 1213.48 Anthony Cutler, Barry Hindess, Paul Hirst and Athar Hussain, Marxs Capital and CapitalismToday, London 197778, Vol. I, p. 2.49MCCT, I, p. 19.50 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, London 1977, pp. 26162.51 A point made with particular acerbity in Anthony Cutler et al., An Imaginary OrthodoxyA Replyto Laurence Harris, Economy and Society 8:3, August 1979, especially pp. 32630.52MCCT, I, pp. 4547.53MCCT, I, pp. 13541.

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retained by Marx. In fact the whole architecture of classical Marxismwas unsound from beginning to endits conceptions of economy,polity, ideology, law and their inter-relations, not to speak of socialclasses or social formations, being unsustainable.

A New and Distinct Framework?

The end of Volume I drew four conclusions from this shattering of therationalist kernel and mystical shell of Marxism, and their replacementby a new pluralist conception of social formations. Firstly, and familiarly,politics and ideologies were in no wise amenable to any reading ofthem for the economic class interests they might represent. Secondly,no ontological primacy could be accorded to any of the sets of relationspresent in a social formation: discursive primacy might be assignedone or the other as a function of socialist political ideology or objec-tivesbut that was another matter. Thirdly, and perhaps most importan-tly, any dichotomy of reform and revolution was a false, utterly obstruc-

tive, one: If the social formation is not conceived as governed by theessential structure of a mode of production and its corresponding formsof State, politics, and ideology then the options facing socialist politicscan no longer be reduced to a matter of confronting this essentialstructure or else refusing to do so . . . This means that socialistsshould be concerned with expanding the areas of socialization anddemocratization in the social formation. Finally, and pregnantly, therelevance of class analysis to socialist political calculation stood inneed of some interrogation.54

In the midst of these findings, as if to reassure themselves, Hirst andhis colleagues remarked parenthetically that their critique of Marxisttheory implied no attempt to defend the capitalist system, rather thereverse, to provide a better foundation for its criticism and transforma-tion.55 Marxs Capital and Capitalism Today was, as it were, both apost-AlthusserianReading Capitaland a post-Marxist CapitalVolumeI representing the first, and Volume II the second. What did the latteramount to? After taxing Marx with treating social formations as somany instantiations of a (non-existent) capitalist mode of production

in general, its authors had called for concepts that would specifyeconomies and economic class-relations, their political and legal con-ditions of existence, and the possibilities of their transformationwithout reconvening a social totality.56 But beyond repetition of theserecommendations and the accompanying proliferating injunctions,remarkably little of the six-point programme for future conceptualiz-ation tabled as an alternative to the various items demoted and inter-dicted was executed. Volume II, it is true, offers analyses of moneyand financial institutions and of enterprises and capitalist calculation.Yet amid the incessant invocation of the specificity, distinctness, particu-

larity, difference, heterogeneity of the phenomena treated, it is less themonotony of the ritual than the paucity of its fruits that impresses thereader. Where not given over to identifying the defaults of Marx,

54MCCT, I, pp. 31418.55MCCT, I, p. 151.56MCCT, I, pp. 23031.

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Hilferding or Lenin on the one hand, and their mainstream opponentson the other, these add up to a plea to attend to things as they reallyare in the capitalist countries of today,57 rather than superimposing adeforming global theory on them. Thus any general theory of capitalistcalculation is to be condemned for positing an undifferentiated universalcalculating subject (the capitalist class) and a corresponding homo-geneous domain of application (capitalism). Any attempt to cash these

in the arena of distinct national economies, the argument runs, isdisabled by the particular conditions or criteria of calculation, andheterogeneous forms of enterprise, characteristic of such economies.58

Considerable illustration of this thesis ensues, but yielding little beyonda limited empirical information (not to be scorned in the mannerof Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production) on such subjects as the diversemeasurements of profit in different accounting systems. As reconstruc-tions go, it is modest fare.

Hirst was subsequently to complain that the new theory of financialcapital, of enterprises, of calculation [etc.] presented inMarxs Capital

and Capitalism Today is invariably neglected by critics.59 Here he strayedinto hyberbolenot in asserting neglect, but in referring to a newtheory. For the unmistakable reflex throughout the book is to inveighin general against general theory and then explain all over again whythe particular subjects under discussion are resistant to such theory.Perhaps this should come as no surprise. After all, the economy-as-totality was shown the front door together with its illustriouscompanions; any general theory of itfrom Marx to Marshall, from

Smith to Sraffawas dismissed as essentialism.60

Hence there wasinevitable something of a discrepancy between the theoretically-satu-rated nature of the (negative) critiques of all and sundry, and themodestly descriptive character of the (positive) alternatives offered. Hadit been otherwise, Hirst and his colleagues might have ended up placingthemselves within range of their own guns. However often MarxsCapital and Capitalism Today gestured towards reconstruction, its logiccould only return it compulsively to deconstruction. Less an alternativetheory than a rebuke to theoretical ambitions? If so, these collectivevolumes were, in the first instance, a reproof to their authors own in

the shape of their reductio ad absurdum of Althussers recasting of Marx-ism. Having constructed a straw tradition of rationalism and essential-ism, workerism and catastrophism permeating the whole of historicalmaterialism, Hirst and his colleagues had proceeded to demolish it totheir evident self-satisfaction. The one domain that might legitimately behomogenized, it appears, was the complex, heterogeneous, contradictoryhistory of Marxism itself, now blithely corralled into the all-embracingproblematics and categories of evolutionism, economism or histori-cism, effacing manifold differences. This was indeed reductionism writ

large.Self-conscious mould-breakers, with their rejection of determination in

57MCCT, II, p. 108.58 See, for example,MCCT, II, pp. 12930.59Marxism and Historical Writing, p. 136.60 See, for example,MCCT, II, pp. 22930.

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any instance by the economic, the post-Althusserians anticipated ascandal. Would not its repudiation, they asked in tones of mock horror,lead to an eclectic pluralism in social causation, with a necessary slidetoward the multi-factorial empiricism of sociology?.61 Whether it mustis debatable; that it does, indubitableand a conclusion not to bedeflected by the sarcasm of its anticipation. Characteristically, Hirst andhis collaborators argued that they were challenging all general catego-

ries of causalitywhether of monist or pluralist inspirationnot replac-ing one by another. But if their principles could be termed causal-agnostic rather than causal-pluralist,62 scrutiny of their theoreticalpractice reveals it to be precisely a promiscuous pluralism of unrelatedfactors and contingencies. The incoherence of the final outcome scarcelyneeds stressingan a prioristic empiricism which nevertheless con-stantly invokes the necessity of theory against any mere pragmatism.

5. Taking Reformism Seriously

The practical significance of such arguably abstruse issues became clearas Hirst and his colleagues spelt out the gradualist political implicationsof their revocation of classical Marxism, ascending to the British con-crete and descending on the Labour Party. While disavowing thestandpoint of national economic management, the authors ofMarxsCapital and Capitalism Today adopted national economies as theappropriate unit of analysis63 and believed that the case for socialism inBritain depended on practical achievements in political struggle andsocialist construction64 at home. There, the central problems to bethought out are the construction of a strategic power bloc in the absenceof its necessity and the seizure and exercise of power under conditionsother than those of armed insurrection. Accordingly, the struggle fora non-utopian socialism should be conceived in Gramscian fashion asa protracted war without arms, a war of position, a successionof investments and siegesa process in which there was no rubiconseparating reform and revolution.65 Denouncing insurrectionism andoppositionismdiscourses of resignation in the face of capital66Hirst and his colleagues insisted on the importance of developing aprogramme of practical reforms whose acceptance and implementation

were realistic prospects. There could be only one credible agent of suchchanges: the Labour Party, with its command of mass electoral support,was the indispensable vehicle of socialist advance. It was true that theparty was itself in need of profound transformation. But in whatdirection? Here the originality of the revisions under way started tobecome plainer. At the very time Hirst and his colleagues were writingtheir conclusions, the first signs of the dramatic conflict that was toerupt in the Labour Party during the next years over its whole natureand future were surfacingas what was already called a Bennite Leftbegan to challenge both the organizational structures of power within

61MCCT, I, p. 128.62 See Erik Olin Wright, The Value Controversy and Social Research, in Ian Steedman (ed.), TheValue Controversy, Verso, London 1981, p. 40 n. 5.63 SeeMCCT, II, pp. 259, 24445.64MCCT, II, p. 262.65MCCT, II, p. 24041, 266.66MCCT, II, p. 260.

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the party, and the overall policies pursued by it. Against the latter, thebanner of an Alternative Economic Strategy had been raised. This hadrallied the Communist Party, where it found wide favour among mostintellectuals as well. After a conventional enough Left advocacy ofgradualism in general, however, the authors of Marxs Capital and

Marxism Today precisely did not endorse the politics of the Left thatwas engaged in trying to change the Labour Party. On the contrary,

the AES was brusquely rejected as unsuitableit presumed too great anexercise of state power, and would provoke too great a resistance to it.Moreover, it comprised in itself numerous shibboleths that needed tobe jettisoned: commitment to nationalization, opposition to cuts inpublic expenditure, hostility to incomes policy.67 More moderation wasnecessary. Above all, the reprehensible workerism and statism of bothlabourist and revolutionary socialist traditions must finally be put torest. Redemption of a weak and ghettoized British Left lay in takingreformism seriously.68

At the time these enjoinders were made, there was a limited audiencefor them on the Left. Even incipient intellectual cousins in the CP werestill some distance from such bald moderatism. But within a short spanof time the national and international conjuncture had changed again,for the worse. By the start of the eighties Eurocommunism itself hadsuffered a general debacle in Southern Europe, one soon followed bythe disgrace of Eurosocialism. In Britain, a dismal Callaghan epiloguehad given way to the triumphant rule of Thatcher. In the United StatesReagan was mobilizing a Second Cold War. The general resurgence of

militant reaction rapidly shifted the whole parameters of bien-pensantculture on the left. In these conditions, it was not long before awider constituency for ideas first canvassed by Hirst and his colleaguesemergedeven as they, in their turn, drifted further along the road ofrevisions to the right. The immediate spur to this progress was undoubt-edly the situation within Labour, whereconfounding their hopesthe Bennite insurgency rocked the Party to its foundations in 198081, leading to the SDP secession. This was a profoundly unwelcomedevelopment. Confronted with a choice between traditional labourismand an unexpectedly combative socialism, the post-Althusseriansin

common with increasing numbers of othersopted for the former,retracting previous indictments in the name of realism and reservingtheir hostility for the latter.

The Moving Right Side-Show

The medium for this moving right side-show was a journal founded in1980, Politics and Power. Anticipating many of the later concerns of

Marxism Today in academic format, it brought together Labour andCommunist intellectuals in the interests of a general reconstruction of

the left.69 The overall tone was set in the first number, in which theAES was scourged in these suggestive terms: The British Left can hardlyexpect to be taken seriously when it claims to favour the most extensive

67MCCT, II, pp. 282 ff.68MCCT, II, pp. 29293, 262, 26364.69 SeePolitics and Power1, London 1980, pp. 56.

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democratization of all aspects of social and economic life and to upholdthe traditions of Western Parliamentary Democracy, pluralism and civilliberty, if at the same time its economic programme savours of the alienand oppressive traditions of the East.70 The second issue contained aglowing affidavit for Herbert Morrison and Ernest Bevin as paragonsof socialist virtue, at the same time contrasting the sincerity andpracticality of Anthony Crosland in later days with the coerciveness of

Bennery.71 On the international front, CND was alerted against thebestial system of repression emanating from Moscow and told thatWestern Europe definitely does have something to defend in the NATOorder.72 Hirst and fellow-interviewers for their part were enquiring ofMP Frank Field how the Lefts proclivity for patently unrealistic policiesmight be avoided, and assuring Sue Slipman, former Communist studentleader freshly converted to the SDP, that they at least did not considerher a renegadewhile vainly seeking to impress her with the goodsense of Denis Healey.73 Meanwhile Barry Hindess was polemicizingagainst talk of a Left Labour government, ridiculing radical criticismof the Callaghan years, clamouring for the preservation of a broadChurch, and scouting the idea of an anti-Thatcher coalition, concluding:In the eyes of many of its supporters and affiliated unions Labourstask is not to overthrow capitalist society but precisely to manage itbetter . . . The successful management of the British economy is animportant and worthwhile political objective for the Labour Party, andone that will be difficult enough to satisfy . . . In the end what is mostdisturbing about the dominant strategies for a left Labour governmentis that they seem designed to ensure that Labour doesnt get the chance

to manage capitalism at all.74

Hindess acknowledged that his views would be anathema to many onthe left, yet appeared oblivious of the fact that as recently as MarxsCapital and Capitalism Todayonly two years beforethe standpointof national economic management had been eschewed by him. Hirstsevolution proved anathema rather closer to home. Reviewing JacquesDonzelots The Policing of Families, he had declared that feminists mustadjust their politics to the place of the family in capitalism and takefull account of mass investment in the values of family life. At this

the majority of women on the board of Politics and Powerquit thejournal, writing that the implications for radicals in politics of PaulHirsts conclusions are horrific, and that nothing differentiates hisposition from old-fashioned Labourism.75 In fact, the journal had ingeneral been a theatre of drastic shifts in outlook, featuring a group ofintellectuals who variously doubted the very existence of capitalism,denounced nationalization as alien and Eastern, rejected price controlsas impractical while asserting the necessity of wage controls, toyed withmonetarism, urged respect for the role of the family under liberal

70 David Purdy, The Lefts Alternative Economic Strategy,PP 1, p. 67.71 Nina Fishman, The Labour Government 194551,PP 2, London 1980.72 David Fernbach, The Impasse Facing CND,PP 3, London 1981, pp. 20518.73 SeePP 2, p. 31; andPP 4, London 1981, p. 218.74 Hindesss contributions were subsequently expanded and published in book form: see Barry Hindess,

Parliamentary Democracy and Socialist Politics, London 1983, p. 156.75 Sec Paul Hirst, The Genesis of the Social,PP 3, pp. 6782; and Fran Bennett, Beatrix Campbelland Rosalind Coward, Feministsthe Degenerates of the Social?,PP 3, pp. 8392.

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capitalism, admired the British Constitution and its civil service, paidhomage to the traditions of Morrison and Crosland, scorned everyelement of even the most modest Labour Left, and opted fulsomely forthe American Alliance and NATO. This was taking reformism seriouslyindeed: promoting the administration and amelioration of capitalism,and restricting polemic to those committed to its abolition. If ever therewas a discourse of resignation in the face of capital, this, surely, was

it.

The last issue ofPolitics and Powerappeared in the Christmas of1981.However short-lived, it had proved premonitory. By 1982 the Commu-nist Party leadership and its principal organMarxism Today, which hadwooed Benn when the tide was running for the Left in the LabourParty, turned towards the Centre and Right once he was defeated asDeputy Leader. Henceforward they would take up many of the themesand positions pioneered by Hirst and his colleagues, with far greatersense of public relations and journalistic effect, as eager outriders of the

Kinnock bandwagon. The familiar result, over the past three years, hasbeen the Eurolabourist consensus that now constitutes the standardconformism of so much of the intellectual Left in Britain. Even as thistook shape, however, Paul Hirst showed his ability to keep one or twosteps ahead of his contemporaries. A recent collection, Marxism andHistorical Writing, contains an essay first drafted with Barry Hindess in1982 and then reworked in 1985, Labours CrisisPrinciples andPriorities for Social Reconstruction, that is an astonishing documenteven by the norms of the prevailing wisdom.

In it, after congratulating the Centre and Right of the Labour Party fortheir genuine realism, and the Leader for his radical but realisticcampaigning position,76 Hirst goes on to write in more general terms:The Labour Party has been an effective party of government. It wascapable, in the period since 1965 (sic) and until the dbcle of1979, ofproviding efficient and stable decision-making within the prevailingparliamentary and economic system and, therefore, of commanding therespect of the leading administrators in the civil service and localgovernment and of management in the big public and private corpor-

ations. Many on the Left will dismiss this with contempt, but they areunwise to do so. It is a crucial condition for being able to do anythingin the way of alternative policies and significant reforms. It stands inclear contrast with the experience of the Tory party in the post-Macmillan era. Civil servants, local government officials and busi-nessmen are widely resentful and critical of capricious and unpredictableTory decision-making. The ability to make the system work is acondition for electoral success and for its meaningful and acceptablereform.77 It would be difficult to imagine even the Editors ofMarxismToday or New Socialist, ofNew Fabian Essays or New Statesman, giving

quite this encomium to the Golden Age of Harold Wilson and GeorgeBrown, James Callaghan and Merlyn Rees. The combination of obsequi-ousness towards an archaic British establishment and delusions ofmatchless service to it here reaches a pitch of inanity rarely equalled

76Marxism and Historical Writing, pp. 154, 156.77MHW, p. 152.

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even in the annals of Labourism and Fabianism, with their traditionallybovine respect for the British state.

The principles and priorities for social reconstruction themselves forma familiar enough roster. Renationalization is undesirable. A permanentincomes policy is essential. Limited measures of industrial democracymight compensate for a necessary shake-out in manpower. Trade unions

bear a heavy responsibility for industrial inefficiency; but Labour isideally placed to reform them. All thought of a left Labour governmentmust be abandoned. For Labours transcendent virtue lies, on thecontrary, in its very amplitude and indefinition. The party as a whole,as Hirst puts it, is strong because it remains in touch with the opinionsof the British people and the facts of political life.78 Was it reallynecessary, then, to take such a laborious detour via Marx and Engels,Lenin and Mao, Althusser and Bachelard, Foucault and Lacan, in orderto arrive at the opinions of the British people and the facts of politicallife?

6. An Absolutism of the Intellect

Where, indeed, do these latest pronouncements leave their author? Nodoubt sensing the problem, Hirst admits elsewhere in the same volumethat he has been led a long way from the words, concepts and politicalpositions of Marx.79 But at the same time he continues to protest hisfidelity not merely to the project of Althusser, but to the inspiration ofMarx. Striking a new note of pathos he now avows: I cannot abandonor renounce the claim to be a Marxist given my theoretical and politicalposition. I will admit to being heterodox and ultra-critical, yes, but Iwill not accept the charge of ceasing to be a Marxist. My work makesno sense if I reject what Marx tried to do rather than how he did it. Icannot renounce the broadest aims Marx set himself, to provide thetheoretical basis for a non-utopian socialist politics which would leadthe people of this earth to make a human condition without famines,ignorance, war and oppression.80 Ronald Reagan himself, of course,could subscribe to this worthy catalogue. Such is what is left of Marxismat the end of the pilgrimage which started with Theoretical Practiceno

longer a jot that would distinguish historical materialism from any othertheoretical outlook or separate the aspirations of socialism from theprofessions of its enemies. In reality, of course, Hirst has long sinceparted with Marx. The authentic accents of the repented and redeemedtell their own story, in the same pages, where Marxist politics cannotaccept ambiguities, absurdities, lost causes or the existence of humanevil.81 Liberal pieties have replaced Leninist dogmas. In the course ofthat transformation, materialism was demoted and then erased altoge-ther, as a critique of representation disconnected language from reality,ideology from class, and politics from economics. Yet the same epistemo-

logical relativism generated sociological pluralism, which justified politi-cal reformism. Socialism dwindled to social reconstruction. Such has

78MHW, p. 154.79MHW, p. 7.80MHW, pp. 78.81MHW, p. 28.

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been the odyssey of Paul Hirst to date. The only safe surmise for thefuture is that these are unlikely to be the last of its vicissitudes.

The sharpest lessons of this journey have less to do with specificpositions adopted or rejected in the course of it, than with generalstylesof intellectual work on the Left. For throughout his career Hirsts workhas been characterized by an enduring absolutism all the more impressive

for his multiple and abrupt changes of direction. From TheoreticalPractice to Economy and Society to Politics and Power; from Pre-CapitalistModes of Production toMode of Production and Social Formation toMarxsCapital and Capitalism Today to Marxism and Historical Writing; fromLeninism to Labourism, and from socialism to social-democracy; fromscience of history to theory of modes of production to theoreticalframework for analysis of social formations; from rationalist epistem-ology to critique of epistemology; from structural Marxism (uncon-ditional Althusserianism) to post-structural non-Marxism (critical Fou-cauldianism)Hirst, his colleagues, and whoever has received theirtemporary benediction have exclusively occupied the place of rigoroustheory and realistic politics, the vantage-point from which all othersmay be indicted. The necessity of theory currently underpins a politicsthat mingles echoes of Hattersley with undertones of Owen. But fromfirst to last, whatever the political or intellectual way-station, the lonelyhour of the theoretical instance has never ceased to strike. In this respect,Hirsts relation to other socialists has never substantially changed: itremains a stance of militant Reformation.

But such reformation is most needed elsewherein that intellectualpractice which adopts and rejects positions in toto, embracing andparading the whole of a doctrine as apodictic only to dismiss it shortlyafterwards as worthless. The age of such theoretical absolutism, fromwhatever quarter of the Left, ought to be over. Marxism above all callsfor a fallibilist conception of knowledge. Greater initial sobriety aboutthe present explanatory powers of historical materialism than that everdisplayed by such as the Young Hirst can only serve to enhancethem, by encouraging necessary criticisms and forestalling gratuitousdisillusionments of the kind narrated here. The recent deconstruction

of Marxism has been destructive both politicallyreinventing capitalismin the act of reconstructing socialismand intellectually. This is not toclaim that classical Marxism is some foundational truth in comparisonwith which all else is mere passing opinion. But it is to say that as aresearch programme historical materialism will only be surpassed whenit has been improved upon. Bref, marxisme faute de mieux, as Sartre oncesaid.

Documents

Elliott Odyssey Hirst