re:sources

Janka Nabay and the Bubu Gang, Sabanoh

Michelle Staggs Kelsall on Dis:Order

‘To do away with all mediation is the most naive of all anarchist dreams.’ So wrote István Mészáros, Marxist philosopher and member of the ‘Budapest School’, in his celebrated 1970 study of Marx’s 1844 manuscripts, known generally as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. A student of fellow Hungarian Georg Lukács, who played a key role in preparing these manuscripts for publication while working at Moscow’s Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute in the early 1930s, Mészáros argued that Marx’s concern with alienation, far from being a youthful fancy, animated his critique of political economy until the end of his days. For Marx, human freedom was to be achieved not through the elimination of all mediation, an illusion whose conceptual untenability Hegel had demonstrated convincingly, but through ‘the concrete practical elaboration of adequate intermediaries which enable the social individual to “mediate himself with himself”, instead of being mediated by reified institutions’. Such self-mediation entailed ‘not the disappearance of all instrumentality but the establishment of consciously controlled socialist forms of mediation in place of the capitalistically reified social relations of production’. It was ‘not enough to overthrow the bourgeois state; its actual functions must be redesigned’. It was not enough to nationalize private firms and enterprises, as what was needed was ‘the radical restructuring of the social relations of production’. Still, Mészáros was careful not to romanticize the point. ‘One can realistically set out only from the available instruments and institutions which must be restructured en route, through manifold transitions and mediations’, he declared, adding pointedly that ‘[t]o pretend otherwise is nothing but dangerous, self-disarming “maximalism” which in reality turns out to be not only “minimalism” but, more often than not, also directly responsible for disarray and defeat’. Mediation went all the way down, informing social relations even at the point of capitalism’s decisive overcoming, albeit on an altogether different plane.

Immanent Critique and Post-Capitalist Transition

Mészáros knew his Marx, and his reconstruction was correct. On the one hand, Marx was committed to an immanent critique of the capitalist mode of production as a historically distinct system of social relations. This system of social relations did not emerge in one fell swoop. Nor did the consolidation and generalization of capitalist commodity production involve, or require, the wholesale eradication of pre-capitalist practices and institutions. Yet capitalist production and exchange belonged from the very outset to a different social-metabolic order, one with its own forms, structures, and regularities. Neither a prolongation of feudalism by other means nor a product of the incremental quantitative aggregation of money or industry (a distinction on which Ellen Meiksins Wood remains an invaluable guide), it needed to be understood on its own terms. For Marx, its overriding organizing logic was oriented toward capital accumulation and the reproduction of its social preconditions, anchored first and foremost in the exploitative relation between those who labour to produce surplus value and those who appropriate such value by purchasing such labour (through the coercive medium of the employment contract, or, when necessary, simply though coercion of a more overtly repressive variety). Among other things, this meant that Marx tended to be averse to engaging in detailed prognostications with respect to the social relations that might arise through capitalism’s ultimate supersession. Clear though it was that a post-capitalist future was both necessary and ultimately inevitable, he was too focused on elucidating capital’s laws of motion to toy with speculative recipes for the ‘cook-shops of the future’. Phantasmagorical blueprints of the sort bandied about by ‘utopian’ (as opposed to ‘scientific’) socialists failed to persuade Marx.

On the other hand, though, Marx did at times venture directly onto the terrain of the future. In his 1877 tract Anti-Dühring, Engels provided what became a classic statement on the role of the state during the transition from capitalism to communism: ‘State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”. It dies out.’ But Marx had gone further two years earlier, in his detailed critique of a draft programmatic document for what would become Germany’s Social Democratic Party. Stressing the need for a ‘revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat’, a state that would undertake the ‘expropriation of the expropriators’ he had envisioned in Capital, Marx maintained that a workers’ state would be needed during the lengthy period of transition en route to the final elimination of capitalist private property and inauguration of common possession of land and means of production. Full communism—an association of individuals freed from capitalism’s fetishized forms and engaged in conscious planning and cooperative production—was to be achieved in and through the deployment of this state’s significant coercive and distributive powers. That is to say, the capitalist state and its ‘narrow horizon of bourgeois right’ were to be supplanted only after the proletarian state was accorded enough power and time to revolutionize social relations.

‘Abolition’ and Mediation

‘Abolition’ is a keyword of the current conjuncture. Resonating with the long history of struggles to eradicate slavery and its multiple afterlives, in and beyond the United States, the term now surfaces in an extraordinarily wide range of contexts, as part of campaigns to do away with police and prisons, border structures and copyright rules, the concept of gender and even the very idea of humans as unique beings. Ours is an era in search of an exit, and ‘abolition’ is especially apt for the moment, offering the solace of uncompromising ruptures without the demand of explaining how to prepare the way for such ruptures in the first place. Given his commitment to the view that intellectual labour is no less socio-historically conditioned than manual labour, this distinction itself being integral to capitalism, even the ‘mature’ Marx was reluctant to offer a guidebook for the final phase of communist society, in which ‘the all-around development of the individual’, liberated once and for all from the capitalist division of labour and its subordinating structures, might foster what his ‘younger’ self had called ‘general human emancipation’. Unshakable, though, was Marx’s dedication to a post-capitalist future in which conditions of social self-actualization would have reached a stage advanced enough to make law, rights, and the state substantively obsolete.

To this end, I read Michelle Staggs Kelsall’s imaginative and thought-provoking call to ‘disorder international law’ as an expression of a much broader trend, buoyed by developments far beyond those which typically seize educators and practitioners of law. Marx would have been broadly sympathetic to these sentiments, sharing Kelsall’s desire for a world that no longer requires alienating institutions and instruments. But he would have broached this as a series of transitions requiring ever greater degrees of collective coordination, a process in which what Mészáros termed ‘consciously controlled socialist forms of mediation’ gradually push aside ‘capitalistically reified social relations of production’. And this would be a process in which state power (and therefore law, both domestic and international) would play a vital, complicated, and ultimately transformative role, long into the foreseeable future.