Intellectual Crisis or Paradigm Shift?

Anson Rabinbach
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Ira's paper begins with an apparent paradox: He agrees with William Sew-
ell's statement that labor history is not in crisis, and yet, the remarkable
historical occurrences and the powerful methodological and epistemologi-
cal challenges of the past decade have produced nothing less than "labor
history's loss of elan, directionality, and intellectual purpose." These devel-
opments are so serious that labor historians are encouraged to undertake a
dramatic departure from the well-trod methodological and thematic path-
ways of labor history. Marxism, which in varying guises was hegemonic in
our discipline for at least two decades, has all but collapsed under the
double pressure of events and theoretical challenges. Its political project is
undermined by a disappearing working class, a declining welfare state, and
the end of European communism, its theoretical preeminence shaken by
new deconstructive and Foucauldian approaches. These approaches have
questioned the timelessness and solidity of Marxist categories, arguing that
the "historical subject" of the theory—the working class—is not a socio-
logical given or an ontologically secure phenomenon; it is a category that is
not merely undifferentiated, but constituted in such a way as to obliterate
its constitutive "other," most preeminently "woman." Poststructuralist his-
toriography undercuts the teleological and triumphalist assumptions of
Marxist philosophy of history, just as the aforementioned events have
shown them to be counterfactual, if not "sentimental reminders of times
lost and aspirations disappointed."
In Ira's paper the profound philosophical and methodological tremors
provoked throughout the Anglo-Saxon academic world by the poststruc-
turalist critique of Marxism appear emblematically in an internal theater of
generational, gendered, and geographical conflict. The overriding mood
suggests a displacement and changing of the guard: The anciens combatants
of British Marxist historiography are challenged by a new generation of
American feminist historians successfully wielding the sophisticated high-
tech armaments of Derridean and Foucauldian discourse theory. (I recall
another anecdote from that 1984 New School Conference: When the male
panelists were challenged to say whether or not they had understood the
implications of the critique that feminist theory posed, there was an embar-
rassed silence until Christopher Hill responded, "No, but we will have to
find out about it, won't we.") Marxism seemed, if not outdated, helpless to
confront these new approaches.
What I find most interesting and most disturbing in Ira's paper is the
contrast between its well-informed (though ultimately evasive) account of
International Labor and Working-Class History
No. 46, Fall 1994, pp. 73-80
© 1994 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.
74 ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

the theoretical issues posed by the crisis and its rather conventional ap-
proach to what might constitute an appropriate response. In fact, the paper
is a study in ambivalence: When threatened, homo academicus shifts sub-
ject matter and paradigm. Intellectual dilemmas are not so much "worked
through" as they are abandoned, much as a room is abandoned when it
becomes too cluttered. This model of crisis might be called Oedipal Kuhn-
ianism: Paradigm changes are the reactions of intellectual communities to a
perceived intellectual exhaustion of one or more previous generations.
They do not have theoretically substantive or historically contingent causes.
I am sure that some labor historians (including most of the participants
in this symposium) will continue to find the theoretical "turn" our enter-
prise has taken in the past decade or so lamentable. I do not, but I would
perhaps go even further than Ira in my concern that some historians are
using theory in ways that are highly problematic, and often entirely pro-
grammatic and unreflective. While most historians have responded to new
theoretical challenges by uniformed silence or polemic, sympathetic histo-
rians are inclined to uncritically adopt the new methodology as a new
totalizing paradigm.
In the first part of his paper Ira makes an important point about the
dangers of too readily substituting poststructuralism for an increasingly
antiquated Marxism—that is, allowing poststructuralism to occupy the
space left by Marxism's demise. But I find his characterization of what he
calls the "postmodern impulse" inadequate and his search for a way out of
the dilemmas it poses premature. Ira's diagnosis of the purported crisis of
labor history is initially presented as a juxtaposition of Marxism and what
he calls "postmodernism," but he quickly offers us a "third way" out of the
dilemma, advocating "a labor history that refuses to choose between cur-
rently fashionable alternatives."
First, Ira calls for "harnessing the tensions" exhibited by the partici-
pants in the New School symposium, "without resolving them" and dis-
putes those who would force a choice between the methodological poles.
However he soon acknowledges that it is not sufficient to simply assert that
we need not choose between the aporias of reality and signification, be-
tween focusing on structure and objectivism and an approach "that cannot
make up its mind as to whether language is a determining prison or wheth-
er discursive contestation is a key to our liberation." Apparently recogniz-
ing that these approaches "cannot easily be rendered compatible," he then
advocates returning to the theme of "civil society," to the long-out-of-
vogue subjects of state-focused politics, law, and institutions, once central
to historians. His paper constantly shifts emphasis between gestures of
flight and gestures of reengagement, rather than attempting to produc-
tively confront current theoretical controversies in light of their possi-
bilities and deficiencies.
I have no doubt that a state-centered program would reintroduce a
whole variety of interesting subjects into labor history: nationalism, civic
Intellectual Crisis or Paradigm Shift? 75

identity vs. party identity, egalitarian democracy vs. class power, and so on.
These are themes that indeed have been ignored by most labor historians,
even if, as David Montgomery points out, institutions hardly have been
dropped entirely. Yet, in choosing to move to a new room, the problem is
that much of the old furniture still reinhabits the new space. If the old
"teleologies" are jettisoned, if simple progressivist and base-superstructure
models are called into question, the new research paradigm should replace
these old chestnuts with blandly neutral "historical-empirical complexes of
dispositions and patterns of collective action pursued by people who have
been inserted, directly or indirectly through ties of family and kin, into the
world of capitalism." Here, Marxism still appears quite intact as a social-
scientific analysis.
Moreover, the question initially posed by Eley and Nield; "Why does
social history ignore politics?" which Ira makes into a programmatic query,
assumes that neither the old Marxisant social history nor the new feminist
poststructuralist history is in fact "political," a remarkable claim that—
tautologically—can be sustained only by focusing on the institutional
sense of parties, interests, and civil society. Both the now-old-fashioned
Thompsonian history, despite its romanticization of anticapitalist and anti-
modern male artisinal laborers, and the new, gender-oriented poststruc-
turalism, with its critique of categories like "experience," "universalism,"
and "humanism," are concerned with the overt and covert forms through
which power is exercised, deployed, and anchored in consciousness. Their
challenge to the conventional definitions of power is simply ignored by Ira's
shift from theory to "topics," to a traditional research agenda.
From my own perspective, I believe that intellectual history can best
contribute to this discussion not so much by trying to find a new and
comfortable paradigm for future research to inhabit as by inaugurating
reflection on the crisis itself. Specifically, it might consider how "the social"
and "the political" can be reconfigured without succumbing to the one-
sidedness of Marxist essentialism and its simple negation by an increasingly
schematic Derridean binarism.
According to Ira's reading, poststructuralist theory correctly identifies
a multitude of Marxist sins. It "rejects Marxist theory tout court as incapa-
ble of overcoming a misplaced naturalness for the working class (hence a
fixity of identities and the exclusion of categories of experience that do not
fit this mold) or its immanent teleological grand narrative." Yet, this char-
acterization misses a central dimension of the poststructuralist critique: its
redeployment of the notion of subject from historical agent to "subjectiva-
tion," the way different subjectivities are "produced" by or "inscribed" in
different discursive frames. Ira is right to argue that the "naturalness" of
Marxist social theory is being challenged. Marxism is a naturalism (it iden-
tifies labor with a natural activity in the social world), an essentialism (it
defines "man's" being as labor and social action), a philosophy of history
(in its progressivist historicism), and a metaphysics of power insofar as its
76 ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

labor-centered male universalism discursively blocks any framing of the

world in nonuniversalistic categories. But, it should also be pointed out
that this is also a caricature of Marxism that suppresses any consideration
of its diverse history. Not all Marxist thinkers were unaware of these inter-
nal issues and one could see how neo-Marxist critiques of positivism, of the
"autonomous" subject, or the reification or "essentialization" of history as
"second nature" (exemplified by Georg Lukacs) anticipated the poststruc-
turalist critique of the subject. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno also
anticipated and addressed many of the issues raised by the poststructuralist
critique of Marxism in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). They not
only criticized the homogenizing, hyperrationalist, and naturalist aspects of
a totalizing self-identical "subject" but pointed to some of the difficulties of
seizing on a politics of "nonidentity" as a potential source of critique and
negation.
Most seriously, Ira avoids directly confronting poststructuralism with
the critique that is implied in his suggestion that we return to the problem
of civil society. Why has the evasion of liberalism been, as he puts it, so
"expensive"? The answer, of course, is that Marxism, with its proletarian
universalism, has focused too exclusively on legitimizing and historically
identifying with the univocal class subject as a disenfranchised and un-
enfranchisable "negation." As opposed to Marxism, the "postmodern im-
pulse" insists on reading this language of a universal class, or "man" in
terms of its textual, power-oriented, gendering, and subjectivizing strate-
gies. Yet from opposing epistemological vantage points, both positions
share an emphasis on the politics of exclusion, while liberalism, however
abstractly, in its insistence on rights, is a politics of negotiation and inclu-
sion. Ira comes close to making this argument directly when he quotes
Steven Lukes's statement about how liberalism tries to adjudicate "fairness
between conflicting moral and religious positions," though he does not
quite bring it into the foreground.
Ira alludes to this problem by presenting it, once again, in terms of a
gendered dramaturgical allegory, the story of the (unnamed) feminist polit-
ical theorist defending her reading of Marx's "On the Jewish Question"
from criticism of her apparent disregard (and of Marx's disregard) of liber-
al rights, or the division between public and private. But he does not draw
the obvious conclusion until later—one that informs (at the margins) the
center of his piece: that both Marxism, in its universal insistence on class
justice, and poststructuralism, in its antiuniversalist insistence on differ-
ence justice, share a contempt for liberalism. The dilemma is both evident
and summed up in Terry Eagleton's (whose Marxist and poststructuralist
credentials are both impeccable) influential Literary Theory, when he
states: "The truth is that liberal humanism is at once ineffectual, and the
best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster." 1
Ira's paper concludes by arguing that liberalism can be redefined to be
much more than an ineffectual, but necessary evil—that the language of
Intellectual Crisis or Paradigm Shift? 77

social justice can be incorporated by liberal theory (as Dworkin and Rawls
have done), just as social justice can be extended by a radicalized liberal-
ism.
Despite disavowals of Marxist essentialism, poststructuralism shares
with Marxism an understanding of liberalism as a "ruse of power." Much of
the poststructuralist criticism as practiced in the American academy today
mimics Marxism's obsolete and often-one-sided insistence on its ability to
penetrate the "false consciousness" produced by the dubious cultural-
political interests of its opponents. If social history was burdened by the
Marxist romanticization of the working class, a metaphysics of the univer-
sal laboring subject, a contempt for rights, and a gendered insistence on
the male worker, much poststructuralist historiography is burdened by its
equally unconscious legacy of Heideggerianism—the fundamentalist flat-
tening and levelling of all "Western" reason (Plato, Descartes, liberalism,
Marxism, Nietzsche) to a homogenizing, gendered, dedifferentiated, and
anthrocentric "will to power." In Gender and the Politics of History, Joan
Scott asserts that "We cannot write women into history, for example, unless
we are willing to entertain the notion that history as a unified story was a
fiction about a universal subject whose universality was achieved through
implicit processes of differentiation, marginalization, and exclusion." In
fact only Marxists believed in the construct of the subject of history or one
central historical narrative. It indeed may be true, as she goes on to argue,
that "man was never, in other words, a truly universal figure."2 But in her
critique of one fiction, another fiction is not far from the surface: an
equally unified story of history as a process of essentialization, denial of
difference, and discursive suppression. Does her insistence on how "man"
as a discursive hegemon obliterates and marginalizes its inassimilable "oth-
er" make all universalist movements for inclusion chimeras? Is it not also
true, as Nancy Fraser has pointed out, that "it is not possible to deduce a
single univocal political valence from a theory of subjectivity"?3 Does
Scott's approach not read the history of movements for universal rights, for
suffrage, and for other forms of recognition merely as a power strategy for
including women in the polity while denying "difference" as part of that
strategy's universalistic and gendered assumptions? To the extent that this
critique of a universalist "narrative" is plausible, it is only demonstrating
that liberalism does not live up to its ideal of inclusion while it in fact relies
on that ideal if only for its negative term, exclusion, as the basis of its
demystification. We are therefore entitled to doubt whether this critique
undermines or obliterates the ideal of inclusion that liberalism at its best
proposes. Here Ira's call to return to "politics" and his response that such
critiques reveal liberalism's limits, hypocrisies, and silences, but are "insuf-
ficient to the task of political analysis" do not deal with the issues. In the
name of a reductionist reading of Derridean "methodology," all too often
poststructuralist historians reduce normative, ethical, and "humanist"
claims to the univocal denial of difference. A history of socialism and the
78 1LWCH, 46, Fall 1994

labor movement that reads the past entirely in terms of a seamless refusal
and repression of gender is as one-dimensional as a romantic, forward-
"thrusting," triumphalist rise of the universal socialist "man."
Derrida on several occasions obliquely has tried to confront his own
Heideggerian legacy by pointing to its fundamental indifference to and
incapacity to make distinctions among different kinds of power.4 Some of
the weaknesses of a language-centered theory in drawing political distinc-
tions and recognizing not merely rights, but the ambivalent accomplish-
ments of universalist humanism—including its moral and democratic
ideals—have become increasingly apparent even to some strong adherents
of poststructurahst theory. In fact, recent poststructuralist contributions,
like those of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, have suggested that
ethical relations be redefined as negotiation contestation, as the ultimate
inability of all totalizing ideals and politics to assimilate contradictory inter-
ests, or, as Drucilla Cornell has argued, to encompass the inassimilable
"other." 5 Still, much of this theorizing goes on without questioning and
historicizing the past of its own theory, which may be understandable for
philosophers and social theorists, but certainly not for historians. As a
result, the most liberating elements of postmodern theory are reduced to
an ideological program, undermining its most important premise, that, as
Richard Bernstein has articulated it, we cannot "any longer responsibly
claim that there is or can be a final reconciliation—an Aufliebung in which
all difference, otherness, opposition and contradiction are reconciled." 6
Ira's paper does not so much seriously engage with his potential critics
as scuttle the debate altogether. However, I believe that it is possible to
productively reframe both Marxism and the poststructuralist critique of
essentialism in ways that also are capable of rethinking and reflecting on
their own assumptions. One answer to the challenge of theory is to histori-
cize theory itself. There is no doubt that Marxism historically exemplified
and contributed to the constitution of a materialist metaphysics that de-
fined labor in terms of its identity with nature, technology, and any mean-
ingful future construction of the world. Both the political universality of
class (justice), its progressive historical destiny, and its epistemological
capacity for totality (as argued, for example, by Lukacs) were predicated
on the productivist view of labor as the core of that history. To question
Marxism, and by implication, the centrality of labor in human history, is to
question the ways this assumption shaped thinking throughout the modern
era.
My book, The Human Motor, is an analysis of the genealogy and
constitution of the metaphysics of labor power—which was hardly re-
stricted to Marxism—as a metaphorics of the machine. It is indebted to
Foucault and to postmodern criticism for its attention to how metaphor
constitutes, frames, and is deployed in practices that circumscribe the
nineteenth-century preoccupation with labor power. It also interrogates
Marxism's insistence on the fundamental interchangeability and convert-
Intellectual Crisis or Paradigm Shift? 79

ability of natural and social forces—a naturalism that both derived from
and was shared with that other great nineteenth-century totalizing theory,
thermodynamics. The naturalistic labor-centered universe that Marxism
both inhabited and analyzed was not a theoretical illusion, but constituted
both an incontrovertible scientific discovery and a way of framing "the
social"—for socialists and capitalists, as well as for Taylorist and anti-
Taylorist scientists—in ways that were "effective" in the world. One can
see in it a discourse that both instituted power but also formed the resis-
tance to it, for example in the ways that the "calculus" of an equitable
exchange between productivity and the conservation of the nation's labor
power offered impetus to the reform ideas of European socialists, notably
Edouard Vaillant's "physiological maximum," the eight-hour day. This self-
understanding of a cosmos, a society, and "natural" bodies that all moved
according to the dictates of energy and exhaustion was both metaphorical
and "real" in its palpable effects on such mundane questions as accident
insurance legislation, the length of the working day, the reduction of fa-
tigue, and workplace exhaustion.
My aim, however, is not merely to point to ways that poststructuralist
theory can and ought to be mobilized to rethink the burdened tradition of
Marxism and its relationship to labor history. A similar genealogy and
critique could be applied productively to the burdens of the poststructural-
ist "impulse." The challenge to historians posed by an exhausted, theoreti-
cally obsolete, and historically defeated Marxism and an increasingly ideo-
logical and reductionist poststructuralism does not have to be the complete
abandonment of these traditions and a return to the problems of a more
extensive liberalism in the institutional framework of civil society and the
state. Labor history can be rethought in many other contexts as well.
Moreover, precisely because these theoretical traditions are so bur-
dened with the historical catastrophes in which they are implicated—
Stalinism and Fascism, respectively—identifying their critical potential be-
comes all the more important and possible. Discussions of neo-Marxism
and postmodernism often contain the tensions of, and are in some part
responses to, the crises of their own intellectual traditions, simultaneously
confronting and evading their totalitarian "pasts" through their critical
dimensions. Responding to the crisis of labor history need not be a predict-
able changing of the guard as paradigm shift, but might be seen in terms of
a more general intellectual crisis provoked in large measure by the events
of the last decade—the inability of communism to internally reform, the
collapse of third-way alternatives, and ultimately the emergence of popular
movements that led to the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central
Europe. This collapse signals not merely a historical "event," but—and in
this respect poststructuralism offers a powerful but ambiguous insight—a
fundamental reversal of the ideal of revolution. Instead of inaugurating a
new advent, a new ideal of "man," these revolutions were directed against
the revolutionary dreams of the past: "The restless dream of Reason, from
80 ILWCH, 46, Fall 1994

which the demons arouse during the past two hundred years, is dreamed
out," as Habermas puts it. 7
Yet, to see Reason itself as the nightmare or the revolutionary excre-
sences of this century as the destructive consequence of a "metaphysics of
the subject" is too undifferentiated a view. Radical democratic theorists
like Jiirgen Habermas and Laclau and Mouffe warn that without a notion
of civil society that is at once critical of exclusion and inclusive, socialism's
most valuable legacy, the ideal of a just society and a more inclusive de-
mocracy, may also be lost. It is interesting that normative theorists, like
Habermas, and non-normative theorists like Laclau and Mouffe, who re-
ject essentialism and foundationalism, have recently come to focus on the
problem of how to redefine citizenship, whether in terms of rethinking
what it means to belong to a "nation," or whether, as Chantal Mouffe has
recently argued, "as the articulation of the various different struggles
against oppression." 8 Whether one focuses on "inclusion" or "exclusion,"
it is evident that without recognizing the tension that occurs in the negotia-
tion of these dimensions, it becomes impossible to arrive at a basic notion
of justice. Despite their philosophical differences, both of these ap-
proaches see socialism no longer as the endpoint of a teleological process
of socialization of the means of production, and both aim to recapture what
socialism always was in its humanist guises: an ethical ideal.

NOTES
1. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis, 1983), 200.
2. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 197.
3. Nancy Fraser, "False Antitheses: A Response to Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler,"
Praxis International 11 (July 1991):173.
4. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geofrey Bennington
and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago and London, 1989), 40.
5. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics (London, 1985); Drucilla Cornell, Philosophy of the Limit (Lon-
don, 1992).
6. Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Mod-
ernity I Postmodernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 8.
7. See Jurgen Habermas, "Nachholende Revolution und linker Revisionsbedarf. Was
Hei(3t Sozialismus heute?" in Die nachholende Revolution (Frankfurt, 1990), 184.
8. See Chantal Mouffe, "Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Politics," in
Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (London, 1992), 382.