Marxism for Tomorrow

An intelligent left today can neither live within nor without Marx’s thought. Marxism today is most
useful when it is erratic, irreverent, non-doctrinaire.
Wendy Brown ▪ Fall 2015

This article is part of Dissent’s special issue of “Arguments on the Left.” To read an alternative
perspective on contemporary Marxism from Benjamin Kunkel, click here.
An intelligent left today can neither live within nor without Marx’s thought. As former Greek
finance minister Yanis Varoufakis reminds us, Marxism today is most useful when it is “erratic,”
irreverent, non-doctrinaire. This means that effective political challenges to contemporary
capitalism, not to mention other orders of injustice or peril (from racism to climate change), must
revise, resist, and supplement Marx. Consider, in this regard, four Marxist arguments:

1. Capital organizes everything in the modern world, and capital is derived from exploited labor.
The first half of this teaching remains profound and important. Marx’s materialism was flawed and
overstated, but this doesn’t negate his essential claim that human beings are unique as producers of
their existence, and hence as producers of their history and world. Moreover, a mode of production
such as capitalism, more than merely ruling, creates everything in its own image, including us. This
insight is vital in the “post-productive” era of finance capital. How else to understand
financialization’s transformation of both the character and aims of states and NGOs, universities
and corporations, start-ups and social life? How else to fathom how humans themselves have
become what the philosopher Michel Feher calls “bits of credit-seeking capital”—whether as
middle-schoolers building résumés or as left magazine editors courting Facebook “likes”? Or to
comprehend why new apps that are free to users and unprofitable may be valued by speculative
investors in the tens of millions? Or to understand how the fates of (formerly) sovereign
democracies like Greece have come to rest on their bond and credit ratings, which in turn depend on
global financial institutions and the finance ministers of other nations? More than monetizing
everything, finance capital has transformed the very nature and measure of value, thus
reconfiguring states, firms, and non-profits as well as human aspirations, human conduct, and even
human anxiety. Marx did not anticipate this chapter of capitalism, but he provided us with essential
tools for apprehending its power to shape the world and its subjects.
The second half of this teaching—exploited labor as the source of all value—is less helpful today.
Grueling, poorly paid work remains a huge source of profit and an important site of critique and
organizing. Almost everything we eat and wear, type on or swipe on, is the fruit of such labor.
Exploited labor, however, is not the wellspring of finance capital and its growing domination of the
globe. This is obvious enough in the EU crisis, the careening Chinese economy, and in quotidian
personal strategies for human capital development. Exploited labor does not drive the devastation—
of people and planet, communities and democracies, farms or universities—wrought by neoliberal
reason and policy. (Nor can we simply substitute credit/debt for capital/labor here. Most states,
businesses, and people are both creditors and debtors today.) Neoliberalism and financialization
have brought new actors and powers onto the world stage; these require a different and more
complex account of capital’s sources, means of enhancement, and shape-shifting capacities than the
labor theory of value can provide.

2. The truth and the fundamental dynamics of capitalism are not found in markets.
Markets are the focus of economists and capitalist ideologues but, says Marx, one has to look
behind them to comprehend both the workings and the damages of capitalism. How do the
capitalist, the worker, and the commodity come into being? How is profit generated? How is value
created? How is class reproduced? Answers to these questions direct us to capitalism’s essential but
hidden dynamics; they also give the lie to its manifest appearance as a free and fair marketplace.
For Marx, the secreted truths of capitalism are harbored in the sphere of production—the place
where things are made and the capitalist extracts surplus labor from the worker. Can we adapt this
insight to the age of finance capital? Rather than financial markets themselves, we would study the
sources and mechanisms of financialization: the rise of shareholder value; the increasingly complex
instruments of speculation, monetization, credit and debt; the capital-appreciating and capital-
depreciating powers of ratings and rating agencies. We would identify the roots of Greek
bankruptcy in the neoliberal foundation of the Eurozone, the global financial meltdown in 2008, and
the economic chokeholds embedded in previous rounds of debt restructuring. We would
comprehend Puerto Rico’s “death spiral” as having been abetted by all that made it capital’s
playground in the past three decades, including steadily downgraded “triple tax-free” municipal
bonds that sunk it into unpayable debt, and untaxed, heavily repatriated foreign investment. We
would not blame the starved and the choked for their failure to thrive.

3. Capitalism has a life drive and a death drive.

The life drive of capitalism is the imperative to grow through the constant search for cheap labor
(and ways to cheapen labor), constant production of new markets and new goods, constant
innovation, and constant invention of new sources of value. Capitalism’s life drive violently
overwhelms the needs of human life, planetary life, and the life of democracy. This voraciousness is
what makes capitalism irreconcilable with any kind of sustainability, and not simply unfair or
inegalitarian.
The death drive of capitalism is overdetermined. On the one hand, Marx theorizes the tendencies of
capitalism toward crisis—overproduction, underconsumption, and the inability to realize surplus
value as profit. (To these, finance capital adds crises of liquidity, bubbles, debt, currency value,
excessive volatility, and market manipulation.) On the other hand, Marx depicts capitalism as
“produc[ing] . . . its own gravediggers” in an ever-growing mass of exploited and dispossessed
humanity that will eventually rebel and inherit capitalism’s accomplishment—the spectacular
productive capacity generated by its life drive. Once this inheritance is seized for the people,
properly shared, and rationally reorganized for human needs, Marx believed, we will no longer need
to labor to live. Liberated at last from necessity, we may finally turn to inventing ourselves together
and individually. We will finally be free.
No doubt, this freedom at the “end of history” imagined by Marx will always elude us. Yet it surely
spirits a future more compelling than one shaped by the ubiquitous marketization—and now
financialization—of ourselves and the planet. It animates the struggle for alternatives, which in the
West today extend from Syriza to Podemos, Occupy, Ahora en Común, and Sinn Féin. Far more
than a class struggle, this is a struggle over the future of the world.

4. There is no God. Nothing animates our history and organizes our lives apart from our own
powers, yet, paradoxically, humans have never controlled their own existence.
For all of history, we have been dominated and bewitched by powers emanating entirely from
human activity but that slipped our grasp. However, says the still-theological Marx, we were placed
on earth to overcome this condition: history drives steadily toward our recapture of these alienated
powers. With communism, the story goes, we will finally control the conditions of existence rather
than be controlled by them.
Breaking this story apart and judging its pieces separately, perhaps we arrive here: Marx’s diagnosis
of a world out of control is right, the progressive historiography is wrong, and the political ideal is
indispensable, especially at this perilous historical juncture. We cannot abandon the dream of
radical democracy and surrender instead to rule by markets, experts, or political maneuvering
indifferent to the common good. We cannot give up the Marxist ideal of collectively taking
ourselves in hand, even if this ambition must now be tempered by humility about our place on earth.

Wendy Brown teaches political theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent
book is Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Zone, 2015).
This article is part of Dissent’s special issue of “Arguments on the Left.” To read an alternative
perspective on contemporary Marxism from Benjamin Kunkel, click here.