In what precise sense should Marx’s materialism be regarded as a doctrine that conceives of truth as a material cause?
And, most importantly, can Marx still be, in spite of marxism, the man of truth whose revolution of thought psychoanalysis should escort until a new political paradigm is formed?
The reason why class struggle should remain the privileged model, to insist on class struggle occupying a position of centrality is precisely not to invoke the ‘working class’ as the only agent of emancipation. In a sense, that is already to treat class insurgency as if it were yet another ‘multi-cultural’ demand for recognition.
It’s perfectly possible to imagine a capitalism in which, for instance, the demand for recognition of alternative sexualities has been entirely satisfied. But class struggle in the Marxist sense could not be satisfied by anything short of the ‘obliteration of bourgeoisie as a symbolic social space’ (which is by no means the same thing as the extermination of the members of the bourgeoisie).
In a very real sense, the proletariat is that very obliteration. This point is perhaps best made by a joke recently recounted by Lenin on the Tomb. An IRA man in a balaclava is at the gates of heaven when St Peter comes to him and says, ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you in’. ‘Who wants to get in?’ the IRA man retorts. ‘You’ve got twenty minutes to get the fuck out.’
For Zizek, Laclau makes the mistake of treating the critique of political economy as a ‘positive ontic science’ (just as his dismissal of class struggle makes the mistake of treating the proletariat as if it were a positive ontic entity, ‘the working class’, rather than a ‘substance-less subject’). What this ignores is what Zizek, after Derrida, called the ‘spectral’ dimension of Marx. In Marx’s ‘hauntology’ – where undead labour is the correlate of vitalized commodities – it is understood that fiction structures reality. To call capital a ‘self-engendering monster’ is not at all to speak metaphorically.
There is a lot to be done with this. Firstly, we can recognize the current political landscape as inherently populist. It is not only, as Zizek said, that populism (whether it be the ‘progressive’ populism of the anti-capitalist or anti-globalization movements or the reactionary populism of the fuel protesters or the Countryside Alliance) is the complement to administrative post-politics. It is that administrative post-politics is already itself populist. Badiou has argued that post-political malaise is not some accidental side-effect of parliamentary democracy but the terminal phase into which it inevitably declines. Populism projects a restricted sense of possibilities, always offers us a choice from a fixed and pre-existent menu. It is the expression of the always-already, the anti-Event.