The Conservatism of Revolution

One of the things that I really like about Raymond Williams is his focus on process rather than category. Much of Marxist theory relies on categorization and finagling a correspondence between Marx's economic model and lived reality under capitalism. However, a lot has changed since the publication of Marx and Engles' Manifesto in the mid-19th century, and the economic and social structures have qualitatively changed. How do we account for the “use value” of a commodity like a Furby? How do we deal with the atrocities in the Soviet Union under a socialist regime? How do we deal with international capitalism and “off shore” manufacturing? The response from many thinkers has been to either throw out Marx altogether or participate in increasingly far fetched revision to fit the lived world into a Victorian model of production.

To me, Williams manages to take the baby out of the bathwater. His focus on Marx's careful attention to social relations reveals the human element at the root of the socialist project. His revision of the term “determines” in “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” subtly reinserts humanity into the economic theory of Marxism. He shows that a historical-materialist framework cannot be used unless we are careful to embrace the whole experience of living within a society. If an economic understanding of industrial production cannot explain a harpsichordist's steady employment, it is not the harpsichordist's fault. By modifying the “base” of society to a process, Williams helps us understand that we live in a dynamic world of relationships (human and economic), including some archaic forms. Therefore, it is a shame that many theorists (Marxist and Neo-liberal) are committed to a 19th century production model. As Williams writes: “What 'Marxism' is at any time seems dependent, finally, less on the history of ideas, which is still among most Marxists the usual way of defining it, than on the complex developments of actual social being and consciousness” (275).

The status of Marx as the messianic communist seems to have gotten in the way of a dynamic view of social relations. Even within Williams, there is a slight conservative bent when it comes to Marx's texts, and he tends to attempt to revise interpretation rather than revise Marx's actual words. If historical materialism is a central tenet of Marxism, the appeal to any text's canonical authority undermines efforts to understand real lived social relations. Williams breaks with tradition by expanding our understanding of economic base, and allowing for a broader incorporation of cultural expressions into Marxist theory.