Theses on Marxism

by Frere Dupont

1. None of us now believe that “Marxism” is the objective thought of objective conditions, do we?

2. Marxism is the study of the development of, and forces belonging to, capitalism, and this from a perspective that is explicitly against capitalism. However, there are flaws in Marxist techniques and categories.

3. Most notably these flaws are demonstrated whenever the implementers of Marxist consciousness initiate a revolutionary activity; it is at the point of realization that they seem somehow doomed to reproduce the capitalist economy again (but badly).

4. Poor practice, on Marxism’s own terms, implies a problem with the knowledge that has been derived from the study of historic forces. The major problem now reveals itself to be one of agency.

5. It would not be going too far to assume from this that whilst Marxist analyses of existing forces of production are more or less accurate, their understanding of the origin of future forces, of what will cause the end of capitalism and replace it, is highly limited.

6. If this is the case then from the Marxist analyses of capital we can deduce that whilst the generalized accumulation of capital really causes what is defined as capitalist society, that is capitalism as a general system, we cannot now accept at face value the assumption that the accumulation of capital also causes either its own downfall, or the embodiment of its downfall in a revolutionary agency, still less a post-revolutionary organization.

7. Therefore, the “real movement” of which Marx talks about in The German ideology, and the dialectic of class consciousness he talks about elsewhere, the “spectre” if you like (that is the agency of the future which is caused by present conditions, and which has been seized upon by many left communists, most influentially recently Dauvé in Marxism’s turn towards subjectivity), now cannot be said to really exist.

8. If the conditions of capitalism are not producing the post-capitalist future but only reproducing the conditions of capitalism, then the future, or communism, must be caused by a principle that exists outside of both the capitalist system and the Marxist knowledge of that system.

9. The question of transformation is itself transformed. Now we are looking at revolt which is derived from elements in human society that are not highlighted by the Marxist paradigm.

10. Of this principle we know only that whilst revolt is “against” present conditions, it is not bound to the path of supersession. It is not obliged by history to resolve society’s contradictions within itself in order to overcome them.