Chris Cutrone
Presented on a panel, “A Marxist science of politics?,” with Atiya Khan-Singh on “Decolonization in the Age of Anti-Imperialism: The Case of Pakistan,” moderated by Edward Remus, held at the 4th Biennial conference of the Caucus for a Critical Political Science, South Padre Island, Texas, February 24, 2025.
What is politics? It is the art of constituting the community. What is a science? A form of knowledge aware of its own conditions of possibility. What is Marxism as a science of politics? It is knowledge of the constitution of modern capitalist society, and how this knowledge of society is made possible by capitalism itself.
Modern capitalism is, according to Marxism, defined, as a mode of production, by the contradiction of bourgeois social relations by the industrial forces of production.
Bourgeois society is the community of labor. Politics in capitalism is the art of constituting the community of labor in the industrial age.
The industrial age is that of the Industrial Revolution: the process of automation. We are still living in capitalism insofar as we are in the community of labor contradicted by the process of automation.
This is a specific society with a specific condition, task and form of politics. To achieve adequate knowledge of this society and its politics requires a specific kind of science. Namely, a conception of contradiction is necessary. Moreover, what is needed is a conception of how a contradiction points to a potential change from within itself: a dialectical conception of contradiction. But such a knowledge — self-consciousness — is peculiar to capitalism and how it points beyond itself to socialism.
Political science as a discipline is a fairly late phenomenon. It is from the end of the 19th century at the earliest, but really from the 20th century. James Burnham in The Machiavellians dated the birth of political science to Machiavelli, but really to Italian Elite Theory of the turn of the 20th century. What is remarkable, then, is the birth of modern political science as a contemporary response to Marxism — and its 20th century efflorescence as a response to the failure of Marxism.
Marxism is commonly accused of lacking a political theory — lacking an account, let alone a science of politics. Specifically, it is said to have a deficient understanding of politics as such, instead attributing politics to economics.
But what about Marxism as a social science — a science of society? Is society reducible to economics? The bourgeois social relations of production are not merely economic: they are legal-juridical.
Marx’s critique of political economy was a critique of the self-consciousness of bourgeois society: political economy was social theory: a theory of social relations. Adam Smith and the Utilitarians, for instance, were moral philosophers — neither economists nor political philosophers.
Moral philosophy was descended from theology, as part of the broader descent of philosophy from religious thought.
What is the history of science — of knowledge? What is the history of our consciousness of society? The first form of knowledge of society was through religion: our community in and with the Divine; our Divine community.
The first state or polis was that of a religious community. It was understood to have been created by a Divine act, creating a fundamental and originary relation between the community and Divinity. The ruling class was the priestly caste, called the First Estate in European Christendom. In this way our first knowledge of society was through our knowledge of the Divine character of the polis.
The other ruling class of traditional civilization, the Second Estate, was the warrior caste. Often the Divine act that established the community was a war, whether a human war on Earth or a war of God or the gods in Heaven, or a combination of both. God aided the humans or humans aided God in their victory. If a community or a people or a god perished, this was itself understood as a Divinely preordained fate. As such the Divine act that established or abolished a community was outside of time, standing either at the beginning or the end.
What was the “rational kernel within the mystical shell,” in Marx’s language, of such a conception? That history itself was identical with the time of the community, defined throughout its course by its origin and telos.
The modern world of bourgeois society overthrew the gods and secularized time, making history identical with this process of revolution. The American conservative thinker Eric Voegelin criticized Marxism for seeking to “immanentize the Eschaton” or trying to make Heaven on Earth. But this was not Marxism’s doing but that of bourgeois society itself.
Bourgeois society’s social relations of labor humanized the Divine act of creating community, placing it in social cooperation itself. Rather than a singular Divine act, this Divine character of community became the unfolding process of history itself through human action.
Not Carl Schmitt’s “Divine violence” of political theology that identifies the community with God and deifies politics itself, but rather Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “vita active” of the “human condition.” Both were contemporaries of the apocalypse of modern society in the 20th century, in which the action of politics became deeply uncertain. How can we know the truth of political action? This is the fundamental question of political science as a modern knowledge of society and its self-conscious direction — not human secular action merely as the unconscious phenomenon of the Divine acting through it.
James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution tried to summarize the lessons of Italian Elite Theory of the early 20th century, synthesizing Mosca, Sorel, Michels and Pareto to grasp the dynamics of modern politics as a “managerial revolution” as the latest of Pareto’s “cycle of elites.” Burnham borrowed from Marxism the idea of history as succession of modes of production, but eliminated the dialectical character of capitalism in Marx’s view, which made it very different from other historical phenomena.
Gaetano Mosca supposedly innovated from Marxism’s focus on the subaltern’s revolutionary class struggle, turning instead to the issue of the reproduction of the ruling class.
If the bourgeois Third Estate of Commoners had overthrown the Divine violence of the gods and the ruling castes, replacing them with the constitution of society by labor, then Burnham took from Mosca a reinterpretation of the ruling class as the organizers and managers of production, with changes driven by military or technical developments. —The gods were replaced by the Divine force of technology, and entrepreneurs as the new priests and warriors, bringing about an apocalyptic change of social production and its community.
The industrial forces contradicting the bourgeois social relations of production in Marx’s view became instead a deus ex machina of the Divine force of nature on the stage of history victimizing the poor laboring humans.
Far from bringing about Heaven on Earth, Hell had descended upon Creation instead.
The struggle of elites in capitalism reverted back to more or less civilized or barbaric wars over the interpretation of the will of the gods between rival warrior-priests — as history had always been, the revelation of the inscrutable and mysterious Divine, to which we had to submit and bear witness.
Was “science,” then, merely what it had always been, the religious veneration of the Divine, led by holy men, who might turn out not to be Saints but doing the Devil’s work, leading us astray from the proper reverence we owed our Creator as Lord, Savior and Redeemer?
Marx called this the “fetishism” of the last stage of prehistory. Burnham’s Marxist contemporaries Adorno and Horkheimer called it the “veil of technology” that was so visibly thin it demanded to be pierced through.
But what made such consciousness — as opposed to Burnham’s reification of alienated technology, society and politics — possible?
According to Marxism, it was contradiction itself that produced consciousness — that made knowledge possible. This followed from Hegel’s discovery that knowledge itself — Absolute Knowing — was borne of the struggle for freedom in and through a condition of self-contradiction and its recognition. “Class struggle” was not against an evil Master — who was merely the character-mask of conditions, and not their cause or responsible actor — but a process of self-recognition borne of contradiction.
Such contradiction was not a Divine force — which would amount to a fetishization and mystification or deification of the dialectic itself — but actually the specific knowledge of a specific society in a certain era of history.
Dialectical and historical materialism was the adequate consciousness produced by the self-contradiction of the bourgeois social relations of labor in the industrial era of production at the moment of its revelation. It was the necessary consciousness of the proletarianized working class in its struggle to overcome capitalism — where capitalism itself was not the evil magical spell conjured by the ruling class — perverse priests heretically violating Divine Creation in the Satanic Mills of their devices — but the alienated society produced and reproduced by cooperative labor, contradicting and demanding overcoming itself.
Political science was not meant to be yet another iteration of pondering the Divine, but the consciousness of revolution in history.
This recognition, already nearly 200 years old, is the meaning of Marxism as a science of politics, called for by capitalism. | §