“Along with the Russian repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, as Frédéric Monferrand explains, these movements [of the 1960s and 70s – JF] inspired a “renewal” of Marxism that now more strongly relied on Marx’s Capital – with the Neue Marx Lectuere, Tronti’s workerism and Althusser emphasizing the rupture between Marx and classical political economy and addressing, in very different ways, the practical issue of social transformation (or its impossibility, as in the case of the NML).”

It may be a small point (a product of hurried editing maybe), but this sentence seems to suggest that, in Monferrand’s view, the Neue Marx Lektüre (NML) utilize Marx’s Capital but deny that social transformation (away from capitalism) is possible. Yet that would be a misrepresentation, both of the view of the NML that Monferrand defends in the Handbook, and of the NML.

One of Monferrand’s main claims about the NML is that ‘the NML’s emphasis on the autonomization of social relations is to be understood as a critical reflection on the objective conditions of (im)possibility of the radical transformation of society’ (Handbook, p. 241). Note that reflecting critically on ‘the objective conditions’ of ‘(im)possibility’ of social transformation is not the same thing as reflecting critically on the impossibility of social transformation. We read that, according to Monferrand, ‘in the NML’s perspective, the supersession of the topsy turvy world of capital cannot be conceived of as the emancipation of, but rather as an emancipation from labor defined as the peculiar form that human activity takes once it is inscribed within the value-form’ (Handbook, p. 244). For Monferrand, the NML do think of emancipation as possible; the NML (according to Monferrand) merely denies that social transformation away from capitalism is possible if labour subject to the value-form is preserved.

Now it is true, as Monferrand goes on to say, that NML ‘does not answer’ the question of how subjects ‘antagonistic’ to capital arise (Handbook, p. 244). But failing to answer a question is not the same thing as insisting that a question has no positive answer. Indeed, an answer can be provided with the help of the NML. This is because: (i) as Monferrand notes, the NML’s interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy focuses on the ‘categories’ of Capital and acknowledges ‘the socially necessary illusions attached to the very practice of exchange’ (Handbook, p. 240, 242); and because (ii) it is but a small step from here to foregrounding the ‘antinomy’ that Marx claims to have discovered in capitalist production’s ‘general relation itself’ (MEW, 43, p. 172/MECW, 30, p. 184; see also MEW, 23, p. 247-9/MECW, 35, p. 241-3), i.e. in its categories, both premises of which can be explained by ‘the socially necessary illusions attached to the very practice of exchange’. This antinomy, I have argued, generates a learning process that grounds a socially anchored emancipatory principle and ethics. So while neither the NML, nor Tronti’s workerism, nor Althusser, say anything useful about this antinomy, reading the NML (in particular the writings of Backhaus and Reichelt) can, in my view, lead to an understanding of its importance for answering a question that the NML ‘does not answer’.

James Furner

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